My brief: Managing waste on an individual level in European households
I have followed the GIBBS methodology to write this entry which you can read more about here.
During week 2 my main focus was on tidying up the challenge from week 1 and setting myself up for the project ahead. I rewrote the brief as I wasn’t connecting with the suggested one which can be found here and got my ethics form prepared and signed off.
I wanted to get further and actually start the week 2 challenge of user interviews and research but getting set up with my new brief required research and just as I was reaching out to people to set up interviews and starting to write the interview questions we were informed that we would need to prepare and hand in an ethics form before we could do any research - the ethics form then became my focus.
As much as I had intended to work more intensely so that I could catch up the rest of the week 1 content and get myself up to speed with the week 2 content, I ended up staying frustrated as getting myself set up to start the project took longer than expected, as a result the week 2 user research work has spilled over into week 3. I am a little anxious that the work will just keep snowballing from week to week with myself struggling to catch up.
I also felt somewhat thwarted by the ethics form being sprung on us unexpectedly as it was not mentioned as a requirement in the content, I don’t always adjust well to last minute changes like this and it cost a lot more mental energy than expected.
All this said, I am happy with the new brief that I have written for myself and excited that I now have everything set up so that I can start to run and manage my own project. I have been really looking forward to user research throughout this masters and it’s exciting to finally sink my teeth into it properly.
What went well: The project is now set up properly and I am free to run it, from now on I can manage the timeline a lot more closely. I also stuck to my resolution from week 1 of using the library space more as I find that I can focus more easily here and it definitely helped.
What went badly: I got stressed from feeling like I was falling behind from writing my own brief and then having to swerve and prepare the ethics form - this caused some frustrating mental fog that I spent a lot of the week combatting and as a result less work than I had originally planned got finished.