Presentation on Scoping Methods

My supervisor Prof. Teal Triggs invited me to deliver a presentation on my research methods; which I did this past Wednesday to MA Design Writing Criticism students at the London College of Communication. Other presenters were Dr. Claire McAndrew, Dr. Yoko Akama, and Sheila Pontis. The presentations were a great way to share some of our work with the MA students and stimulate questions and conversations, but it was also great to listen to the presentations of peer researchers who are working along parallel lines, or within the same discipline.

Presenters (L to R): Sheila Pontis, Joanna Choukeir, Claire McAndrew, Yoko Akama

My presentation covered scoping methods, i.e. methods used in the first phase of a behaviour change methodology. The methods presented were a mixture of practices developed as part of my work with Uscreates, in addition to a more in-depth overview of ‘Explorations’; a method within my PhD research. A podcast and slideshow of the presentation is available below:

1st International Visual Methods Conference

Last week, I attended the 3-day 1st International Visual Methods Conference at the University of Leeds. The conference brought together over 250 academics and professionals from social and visual research and practice fields, and involved over 150 presentations.

Some presentations covered visual methods as a means of collecting insight on the field, such as disposable cameras, mapping exercises, film diaries… These methods have very similar aims to the ‘Explorations’ cultural probes method that I have used in my fieldwork in Lebanon during the summer. Other methods looked at visual methods as a way to communicate information such as the use of visuals in education, guidelines for creating effective diagrams, online communication platforms… And finally, a group of presentations focused on analysing visual material and extracting valuable information from them through qualitative and/or quantitative methods. The paper I presented at the conference would fit within this category: The methodology behind Visual Politics, which started as my MA practical project and thesis at the London College of Communication in 2007, and was later published in 2009 in the project section of ////o/ as an ongoing analysis archive of Lebanese socio-political graphics. This is a podcast and slideshow of the presentation:

I found the conference useful because it helped draw the following conclusions on visual methods:

– Visual methods can be used in different stages of the research: To collect insight, analyse insight or communicate outcomes.

– A collaboration between researchers from both social and visual fields can help social researchers understand and use visuals more effectively, and visual researchers invest their skills in needed social applications, thus bridging the gap between these two disciplines. Sheila Pontis, a PhD candidate at the London College of Communication, writes about this gap in more depth here.

– The high attendance and high volume of papers at the conference suggests that the interest in visual methods is significantly large, and many key contributors to the field attended and presented, such as: Gillian Rose, Sarah Pink and Claudia Mitchell.