Before I continue with more concrete blog posts about my research topic, I want to emphasize how important this first research stage was for me. I now have a mind map connecting all my interests, forming the basis for future research and specification. This process took way longer than originally planned and while my last blog posts gave only a short summery of the current state of the mind map, most of the time has been invested into exploring new sources. I will constantly add new sources and structure the mind map, but the current state already gives me good insight and a basis for future work.
As someone who is constantly seeking new knowledge and understanding, I have now learned the value of allowing myself to go down rabbit holes and explore my curiosity. While it’s easy to get caught in algorithmic rabbit holes, I try to stay focused on what feels meaningful and resonant to me. This exercise of organizing and categorizing information has not only helped me to strengthen my critical thinking skills but also to analyze and make connections between different topics.
I often tend to have the desire of reinventing the wheel but as Steve Jobs famously said, “creativity is just connecting things.” – and that’s what I tried with this mind map.
This blog post is a follow up to my previous post and focuses on additional collected sources for my mind map. This will also be the last blog post giving insights into my exploratory research stage as I will focus on clustering the topics to get deeper insights into intersections and further research on topics already on the min map. During the week I added 34 new sources to my mind map which gives a total number of 60 sources.
Note: Since all notes on the mind map are linked to their sources and are used for structuring my research interests only, I will not provide additional information or references on all topics at the end of this post.
What has changed I added sources to the topics “Generative Art” (which I renamed to “Design with Code”) and “Media Didactic” – focusing mainly on the topic “Media Didactic”. Moreover, I found an article about exhibits in the New York Hall of Science and added it to “Institutions”, giving insights into the mechanics of the work being done behind the scenes. [1] Finally, I added two blogs about technology, society and critical making and a book about mathematical principles behind our physical world including possibilities of creating a digital world out of it. [2][3]
exploratory research – mind map
The Human Perception In the following paragraph I want to talk about multi-sensory perception, as the human perception is the bases for every interaction. When we speak about hands-on exhibits, the visitor first has to perceiving his environment. This is being done via multiple sources of sensory information derived from different modalities like vision, touch and audition. Some sources derive from different modalities but provide information about the same object. For example, a flying bird can be seen with eyes or heard with ears. This phenomenon can also be described as redundant sources of sensory information and is used by our brain to interact with the environment in a purposive fashion. [4]
Now let us connect human perception with the ability to learn vocabulary!
The more matching sensory impressions are involved in the learning process at the same time, the easier it is for the brain to understand and store the vocabulary. According to a research article from the Max-Planck-Society, the movement system in the brain appears to be particularly important – active movement and gestures have helped remembering the vocabulary. Apart from movement, the authors state that pictures have also helped to remember vocabulary better. However, further research must be made. [5]
Despite the fact that this theory sounds very logical and having made the experience that learning is easier combined with movement too, I would like to add that humans can not only be seen as rational beings. In my opinion emotions play a fundamental role – not only when it comes to the process of learning as in one of the articles noted, but also in the way we process and interpret the perceptions of our environment.
In this blog post I’m going to focus on the topics I worked on during the last two weeks. Inspired from a lecturer I did my research about all the topics connected to my proposed master thesis, that I got in touch during the last year. In the first week I searched for different keywords exclusively, giving me the freedom to dive deeper into very different disciplines without getting lost in detail. The second week was dedicated to clustering, arranging and finally lead to a mind-map.
topics for mind-map
In the following section I want to give an overview of the mind-map and discuss how working with a mind map helped me in my research. The mind-map itself was made with a tool called Miro and shows the clustered topics according the ones mentioned in the upper section.
With the described approach, I want to overcome the pressure I put on me when researching topics. By separating data collection and processing, I want to achieve a feeling of freedom and curiosity that gives me excess to my true interests without being influenced by narratives distracting me. Moreover, this process gives me the freedom needed to switch my focus within topics without the urge of coming to a conclusions, as this will be done later while data processing.
While this is only the clustering of my findings and not all of this year’s topics are on the map, this process truly helped me visualizing my findings as well as showing me potential intersections.
The following blog posts will provide a closer look at the topics including filtering the most relevant aspects and further developing the map.
