I started idea generation by doing some brainstorms reacting to different questions. The questions were:
What makes me cry?
What makes me angry?
What makes me excited?
What makes me laugh?
What stimulates me intellectually?
What interests me?
I chose to brainstorm as I am somebody that needs a visual way of trying to get my notes down in the beginning. Listing them all straight away would have made me feel overwhelmed and I probably would have started getting a bit confused. Please see the gallery below for the brainstorms and I will also list them below that.
What makes me cry?
- Ignorance
- Homelessness
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Injustice
- Pain
- Loneliness
- Death
- Poverty
- Stress
- Petty Crime
- Existential Crisis
What makes me angry?
- Indifference
- Poverty
- Injustice
- Greed
- Racism
- Restriction to education
- Sexism
- Unsolicited Advice
- Ignorance
- Lying
- Scammers
- Hypocrisy
- Homelessness
- Starvation
- War
- Brexit
- Money being hoarded
- Violence
- History Denial
- Denial
What makes me excited?
- Buying gifts
- Seasonal decoration
- Learning new things
- Different cultures
- Music
- Trying new food
- Technology advancements
- Medical breakthroughs
- SpaceX launches
- Unusual ingredients
- New recipes
- Languages
- Seeing family
- My nephews
- Autumn-Winter season
What makes me laugh?
- Anxiety
- Sudden bad news
- Witty humour
- Babies laughing
- Jump scares
- Being scared
- Melissa McCarthy
- Sarah Millican
- The good place
- SNL (Saturday Night Live)
- Betty White
- Funny coincidences
- Unexpected things
What do I find intellectually stimulating?
- People
- Physics
- History
- Biology
- Technology
- Behaviour
- Textiles
- Entomology
- Hand crafts
- Cultural differences
- Architecture
- Mental health
- Learning differences
- Other points of view
- Processes
- Procedures
- Chemistry
What interests me?
- Card making
- Interior design
- Sandbox games
- Knitting
- Crochet
- Drawing
- Sculpting
- Embroidery
- Playing the keyboard
- Cooking
- 3D modelling
- Other languages
- Debates
- Horror games
- VR
- Horror movies
- Paranormal
- Tabletop roleplay
- Drag queens
- Gay culture
- Design
- Card making
The next step after identifying these seeds was too break them down into good starting points and bad starting points. I asked myself a few questions to help me decide.
How much research can I do on the subject?
What is interesting about the subject?
Will I become bored of this subject?
Is the subject currently relative?
I instantly was able to rule out a lot of them just by googling them alone and seeing that there wasn’t a great deal of information about them. I also combined a few of the ideas and abstracted from them a little. I was left with.
- Learning Differences
- Hunger
- Homelessness
- Poverty
- LGBT culture
- Entomology
- Assistive technology
- Restriction to education
- Architecture
- Anxiety
- Technological breakthrough
- VR
- Textiles
- Ecosystems
- Horror and the paranormal
I then decided to try to group these even further and see if there was a way to combine several ideas into one. The most obvious one to initially combine was ecosystems and entomology until I was left with life and the balance of ecosystems. I also combined the ideas involving people into health and health education. I was finally left with four avenues of research to explore in my second week.
- Health and health education
- Created by hand
- Life- Ecosystems and balance
- Parapsychology
My next step is to take these through to the second week and begin researching them individually to see how interesting they truly are.