We were out of school last week for Thanksgiving/Fall Break which was great because it gave me a chance to attempt to play catch up on my projects. This is our final week of class. Next week is finals week but I don’t believe either of my classes will be officially meeting.

I have three projects that I’m currently working on:

  • a research methodology project on How design can help victims of sexual trauma understand their legal options
  • a group web project on Design Entrepreneurship called HatchED
  • and a learning object on consent called ‘How not to be a Rapist: A Pocket Guide to Consent‘

Research Project: Interview with 2nd Chance

I made good progress on my research project. This past Wednesday I have a very interesting interview with two staff members at 2nd Chance. We spent an hour and a half discusses their services, how they aid victims of sexual trauma, and what problem they face, and what problems they think are most common for victims. It was really fascinating and I feel like it has filled in a lot of holes in the process for me. Ex. I wasn’t really sure what groups I worked with when I went through my own case but now I feel like I can identify what roles/agencies most of the people involved were with.

Transcribing my interview was a bit of a challenge due to it’s length and it being a three-way conversation. I used a Google Web App to do an initial transcription but it was buggy so I had to play my recording in 2-3 minute chucks and then copy and past the content. Once I had the initial transcription I had to listen to the recording one to two sentences at a time so I could make corrections — lots of them, add line breaks, punctuation, and identify speakers. Updating the initial transcription took me almost two days. Honestly I’m not sure if doing the initial transcription through Google saved me any time. An interesting problem I ran into while transcribing was formatting and punctuation. People talk differently than they write often changing thought mid sentence and returning to previous ideas. Body language and tone also communicate a lot but I didn’t have any visual recording to reference. I can see why it’s ideal for research reasons to do video interviews as opposed to just audio.

HatchED – Group Web Project

I spent one day reading, writing, and troubleshooting our website. I fixed some navigation issues but failed to find solutions to others. I also set up an Asana Project and made a check list of each of the issues I found that we need to address so we can stay focused and organized. I really wish I knew PHP and I could really use a brush up on HTML and CSS.

How not to be a Rapist: A Pocket Guide to Consent

Visually I didn’t make any progress on my learning object, but I did a lot of research and I finally nailed down my concept. I have a habit of overthinking and complicating everything. For this project I kept getting stuck thinking I needed to address a ton of various issues but then I reminded myself of what a learning object is and of how narrow it’s focus should be which helped me decide to focus on consent. Now to find the best way to communicate it. -fingers crossed-