We have established our sensitising process around the topic of “emotional connections to objects” as we hope to discover the patterns and behaviours of users when interacting with an object. This will help us understand what factors affect stronger connections between individuals and objects, and subsequently apply or subvert these insights to create a serendipitous, immersive experience.

As discussed in “Context mapping: experiences from practice” by Visser, F.S et al (2005) “the basic principle of the exercises in the package is to let people express memories, opinions, dreams etc. around the central topic in the study”. In order for participants to express themselves freely, our participants will be given a week to complete their sensitising activities at home in a comfortable, familiar environment, so they can, “pay their full attention to their feelings, attitudes and routines” Visser, F.S et al (2005).

Moreover, to successfully draw productive and deep insights, we will create our sensitising exercises in a combined workbook and diary format to “stimulate participants to reflect on a daily pattern and slowly become more aware about their experiences” Visser, F.S (2005).

Our goal is to create our sensitising exercises to be out-of-the-box and engaging. Thus, our participants will be asked to take care of an egg over four days and document their interactions in a diary format. Each day, we will supply them with a simple exercise where they interact or perform an activity with the egg, with a focus on exploring their “feelings, attitudes and routines” [Visser, F.S et al (2005)].

Since the topic for our sensitising exercises is “emotional connections with objects” we plan to ask participants to smash their eggs one week after at our make-and-say sessions to observe their reactions. This will provide insight to whether participants are able to develop an emotional connection to a mundane and unusual object (an egg), and what the influencing
factors are if they can/ cannot.

Our photo exercise will be in a diary format where participants take two photos a day of different objects over the duration of three days. The second part of the photo exercise requires participants to pick the objects they resonate with the most/least and provide three reasons to justify their decision. We hope this exercise will provide insights to what factors initially attract individuals to certain objects, their likes and dislikes, as well as highlight any patterns in participant responses.

We have decided to utilise the diary format as it, “supports the participant to continually think about the subject...” Visser, F.S et al (2005), and helps participants familiarise themselves with, and reflect on the relationship between an individual and object.

Our photo exercise will be in a diary format where participants take two photos a day of different objects over the duration of three days. The second part of the photo exercise requires participants to pick the objects they resonate with the most/least and provide three reasons to justify their decision. We hope this exercise will provide insights to what factors initially attract individuals to certain objects, their likes and dislikes, as well as highlight any patterns in participant responses.

We have decided to utilise the diary format as it, “supports the participant to continually think about the subject...” Visser, F.S et al (2005), and helps participants familiarise themselves with, and reflect on the relationship between an individual and object.

Our ‘Ranking Influences’ exercise will ask participants to rank each factor (aesthetic, familiarity, storytelling, culture awareness, artistic learning, distinguishment) from 1-6, with 1 having the most influence on their attraction/interest to the object. Participants will then be asked to list and justify their top three choices.

This is an easy exercise designed to reveal what factors are important in creating a user’s initial attraction to an object. We hope to understand what users find most/least important when interacting with objects, which should subsequently reveal what connects users to certain objects over other ones. This particular exercise will also provide insight to the patterns/ commonalities across participant responses.

We have chosen three context-mapping activities; a collage, a timeline, and spatial circles to ensure we collect data that covers our participants’ emotions, feelings, and intuitive knowledge. As discussed in “Contextmapping: experiences from practice” by Visser, F.S et al (2005)”, the first collaging exercise will be positioned at the beginning of the participant-led make-and-say session to “open the minds of the participants by stimulating them to make associations and revive memories.” We have chosen to lay out our collaging exercise with an axes framework as it indicates change and attitudes - where the x-axis ranges from ‘then’ (left) to now’ (right) and the y-axis ranges from ‘like’ (top) to ‘dislike’ (bottom). 

We will provide the participants with a collage of diverse images consisting of literal and ambiguous images within different contexts and topics. This is supported by Visser, F.S et al (2005); who advises to incorporate a “balance between positive and negative images and between concrete and abstract images” to allow participants to interpret as they please, and “tell their own stories with the images and words”. Once the participants are provided with their collaging toolkit, they will be encouraged to freely express their thoughts and emotions as relevant to the question, “map out your experience when interacting with familiar/ new objects”.

Consequently, this collaging exercise will enable us to “elicit memories and emotional responses” [Visser, F.S et al (2005)] from our participants, which will provide substantial insights to each participant’s explicit, observative and tacit needs, preferences and motivations [Sanders, E. B. N., & Stappers, P. J. (2012) ]. Through these collages, we also hope to understand how participants determine the value of objects, and their emotional journey with familiar/new objects.

Moreover, the use of cognitive mapping exercises such as the timeline and spatial circles is beneficial in “eliciting intuitive relations of patterns or processes” [Visser, F.S et al (2005)]. The timeline will be particularly effective in determining the participants’ basic journey throughout the museum.

Additionally, through the use of layering questions, we can also delve into the four levels of knowledge [Sanders, E. B. N., & Stappers, P. J. (2012)] - particularly the tacit and latent levels - to truly understand our users’ motivations, preferences and behaviours. Similarly, spatial circles effectively allow participants to describe relationships and show links. Hence, by using this technique, we will be able to truly understand participants’ emotional priorities when creating a connection/relationship with an object.

Finally, we plan to conduct post make-and-say session interviews as an extra research method to follow up on interesting leads during the session, and discuss newfound insights with participants. In reference to Jacob & Furgerson, “When we interview, we ask people to share their stories”. As such, by using semi-structured interview questions, participants will be able to reveal personal attitudes, perspectives, insights and experiences in greater depth.

Analysis

Data Analysis

Once we successfully conducted our context-mapping sessions we started to analyse our data by transcribing our sessions and converting them to statement cards that would be useful in catalysing intuitive insights or themes. Through this process our synthesis and analysis of our data eventually became quite confusing as we were creating lots of recurring themes through grouping our statement cards ineffectively. Observing our first iteration of our Affinity Diagram of data analysis we realised that we were just stating facts in each statement card, which generated numerous repetitive themes, instead of analysing effectively and deeply.

However, by working collaboratively, we created several iterations of our Affinity Diagrams of data analysis. This allowed us to group the statement cards constructively and appropriately, eventually revealing intuitive and concise insights in the end. Throughout our data analysis process we worked well together as we all attempted to include everyone’s suggestions on potential insights we could establish whilst being critical on considering what was important. We tried not to force any preconceived themes or insights into our Affinity Mapping process as it is advised to analyse “with an open-mind [and be] prepared and surprised by what the participants have expressed” [Abram, S. et al (2007)].

Moreover, we took our time in synthesising as we all understood that data analysis is a significant and important stage for our research which is reinforced by Visser, F.S et al (2005) where we should “allow appropriate time at the start of a project to analyse the most important issues and consider how they are being framed”.

Once we have collected the most intuitive and concise insight from our research, we started to create a poster that depicts the most important insights in hierarchical order and put into 3 categories, resulting behaviour, interactions and emtional journey. We also ensured that the poster we created will be able to communicate effectively to viewers who are unfamiliar with the research and might help the viewers to empathise with the target group that we have chosen.