Research

Since the start of week 1 I’ve tried getting down as many things as I could, some on paper, some on a miro board. This week is critical as we are expected to present our four research topics next week to the class (in 10 minutes, mind you), so finalising my research was number 1 priority at the start of the week, then to building the presentation.

Here’s my post dedicated purely to my topics and research.

Towards the end of the week I started having doubts about my topics, feeling like they weren’t exciting enough or were too disconnected. The workshop below admittedly did help a lot with that feeling since I got to have in-depth conversations with my peers on the chosen subjects.

Workshop

For this workshop we needed to get into groups, pick one research topic amongst us and try to explore it as much as we could. It was really fun and interesting to get each member of the team to talk about their topics, while it wasn’t the aim of the activity – we took on the challenge of trying to find connections between our topics, for example: linking Jess’s topic of fear and Maria’s topic of DNA altering to my Uncanny research. In the end, we decided to look into my topic: The Uncanny (or Uncanny Valley) since it seemed to be the middle ground that we could all easily contribute to.

We used the card prompts on the left to assist in picking things out and getting them down:

A question that came out of the workshop that really stuck with me was “Does the uncanny always have to be horror?”. Since the uncanny has already been extensively explored in media and games, often falling under thriller and horror genres, it begs the question – is there a way that we can subvert this?