In September 2019 we had the first general meeting of the OpenDOTT consortium, with the five fellows, supervisors and members of all partner organisations. The meeting took place in Dundee, and as well as being the perfect way to get acquainted with that many people in a short period (there were almost 20 of us), it was also very productive.
I had just returned from my first research trip and was already burning with loads of new questions. The day prior to the meeting, instead of working on my presentation I decided to walk. In fact, I got my son's broken scooter and tried to find some way to repair it in the city. I've been to hardware stores, bike shops and second hand outlets. Naturally, just like every other city there are a lot of repairpeople working in Dundee, but the specificity of the bolt that needed to be replaced made the repair not that trivial. Good food for my research, in any case. But the scooter was still broken (I eventually managed to have it fixed by the volunteer bike repair guy working on Saturdays by the Tayside Re-users, but I'll leave that story for later).
After a speed dating exercise on the first morning, we had an introductory session on design research by STBY and Quicksand. Then on to present our research so far (sketches of literature review, research questions). The next day we reconvened to learn about the specifics of this year's plans, and then spend time with our supervisors. I had a great time, and ended up with a lot more to process - but with a lot of relevant references and arguably an alternative framing to some of my themes.
Here are the quickly assembled slides I used to present my research so far:
Some insights and open questions arising from the discussions:
A plan for exerimenting with design research started to appear as well:
Key themes:
Key questions:
Who?
During the first year:
In the second day, we had the chance to spend more time with our supervisory teams. My notes are below:
In the end, those two days brought even more insights. I will spend some months processing and working on the ideas generated then.