The first week of the research was a great exploration for me to gather around lots of potential topics and to have a thorough reflection on my interests and how my past experience can help me generating ideas and add value to the overall research. After the divergent phase, I started to converge my ideas and to narrow down topics to a few that both are valuable for the scope of 9 months research project, and feasible in terms of I already have some sort of understanding or experience in the field so that I don’t need to start from the most fundamental stage.
The class activity we did last week in class really helped me with this narrowing down process. As we started from three larger topics for the general directions, I put down “NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) Arts”, “Technology education accessibility”, and “UX and Web design”. I choose these three topics because, first, I want to include something I’m familiar with and already have a certain amount of experience in, which is the “UX and Web design”. I have approximately 4 years of experience in UX design, so including this topic will help me with the feasibility part of the research project overall. Second, I want to pick something I deeply care about from the social aspect, which is the “Technology education and accessibility”. Technology has forever changed the way we live and think, and technology education has increasingly aroused people’s attention. However, not everyone has the fortune or opportunity to have access to it. In many places and countries of the earth, people don’t own a smartphone or a personal computer, not to mention having access to the internet. Technology education, for people who live in places like that, is a foreign term. The lack of technology education creates problems of not having equal opportunities for getting information and knowledge. Growing up in an environment with great technology education, I want to find out ways to improve this situation and make technology education more accessible. For the last topic, I want to choose something I’m interested in and trending, which is “NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) Arts”. NFT is a huge thing nowadays and some NFT arts are sold for the worth of millions of dollars. I think this is a really interesting phenomenon as people are willing to pay that much money for a proof of unique ownership of a piece of digital art. The rising of the NFT community further proved that technology has greatly changed the way people think and behave.
Combining those three topics together, I came up with a more detailed research topic, “How can we improve the UX of NFT platforms, so that people can be better educated about the technology behind and better understand the concepts, therefore making the NFT community more inclusive and transparent?” For the next steps, I will dig deeper into the topic and ask myself questions from the aspects of who, what, when, why, how to generate a detailed research plan. I will also start reading articles on the related topics to see how the current situation is and how other people think of it.
