Getting started has been a process that has been going on since Easter. Having to do my portfolio (which I will post later on this website) and getting ready to show to the outside world what your work is all about is not something I have done previously in my academic life. If you spice that up with making your thoughts globally accessible then you have an interesting cocktail. Much of it is about how you frame it I guess and for me personally a very necessary part of reflecting.

I meet with my thesis councillor Vinay Venkatraman the other day and discussed my thoughts. My idea is to do a deep dive into the life-world of people stricken with Dementia  in the context of the elderly home. At CIID we did a project in GUI design with the elderly home as a venue of research and our team decided to focus on the two diseases mentioned above and memory therapy.

This is to  still the project that moved me the most. In my opinion there is a lot to be done in the area of elderly care and on top of that slowly losing your cognitive abilities along with your identity and dignity has to be one of the worst ways to go. And thus a motivation for doing my thesis project in the context mentioned above. I am hoping to strike up a cooperation with the Danish Elderly home of Sølund located by the lakes in central Copenhagen between Nørrebro and Østerbro and I will also be contacting the research venue from the GUI project, the elderly home of Betania in Frederiksberg. I am very aware that this project will require a very close contact to both people and the elderly home.

Process?
My focus will be on research and organising the subsequent large amount of data transforming it into insights that can be used to develop solutions serving the needs of this group of people. This approach will undoubtedly put a heavy strain on my ability to keep focus and to be able to see patterns in the research but also to recognize the odd ball out or opportunity when it shows it self. Working alone for the first time since first year of university (2001) I will have to develop some kind of method to organize my insights for later reference and simply be able to put something away in order to keep the overview. That is going to be a work in progress!

I will be trying to vigorously document my process since the idea of reconstructing the path of insight often is more storytelling than fact. If anyone feels up to it we can always have a discussion whether or not it is at all possible to “truthfully” reconstruct insight

It is my plan to update this Blog regularly and to share my thoughts and insights. I regard this as being a part of my process but maybe also a part of my method. Time will tell:)