“Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress.”
– Steve Grand

How I Spent My Time

While I continued bibliographic research the a lighter degree, most of my time was focused on getting employee interviews underway. I have developed questions, activities, materials, and a list of potential interviewees. So, this coming week should see at least the scheduling of my initial interviews if not the interviews themselves.

What’s Working

The design principles continue to be a central, grounding, pivotal tool. When I began developing questions for the interviews, I was able to refer to my design principles—which are effectively hypotheses—and easily translate them into a series of questions.

I think my time was well spent translating my questions into activities that I will be able to conduct during the interviews.

Google Docs. I love Google Docs.

What’s Not Working

This week was generally pretty smooth. Nothing to report here.

Substantial Changes

Nothing substantial. I continue to massage the schedule, but I have not made any substantial changes.

One of the most common ways in which the expansion of relationships is observed is by formal role relationships becoming socially embedded in personal relationships that are infused with norms and values.
– Bill McEvily, Vincenzo Perrone, and Akbar Zaheer

How I Spent My Time

This week was focused on doing my last big dive into bibliographic research. The last of my prioritized items on my reading list were taken care of. A lot of the reading I did was on trust in organizations. Pretty interesting stuff.

What’s Working

The phase of bibliographic research has been good. While I am stating that it’s over, I will undoubtedly be dipping back in at least whenever I am in the midst of completing the written component.

What’s Not Working

It’s time to transition. I have definitely exhausted my current stores of relevant bibliographic materials.

Substantial Changes

Nothing to report.

How I Spent My Time

Bibliographic research. Specifically looked into the topics of surveillance, privacy, and power from a philosophical standpoint. Lots of references to Foucault and Bentham’s Panopticon.

What’s Working

I am beginning to write ad hoc paragraphs to capture those spur-of-the-moment syntheses that occur while doing bibliographic research. These paragraphs will likely find a place in my final written component—if not form the basis for some the sections.

Narrowing my topic is good. Right now, I am focused entirely on the user experience for the employee. There is more than enough in this realm when it comes to consolidating all the concerns regarding privacy, personal data management, and organizational trust. The manager/employer user experience is being downplayed currently and will likely be removed almost entirely from the visual component with only some mentions in the written component.

What’s Not Working

Getting slammed at work is not working. I have begun conversations with my manager about taking a few days off here and there over the coming months.

10+ hour days of research. It’s barely working. Or, perhaps, I should say that it is not a sustainable option.

Doing bibliographic research that will likely have little benefit to my final product. I have a problem of being too thorough(?) in this regard. It probably means it’s time to begin other thesis work—i.e. user research, sketching/brainstorming.

Substantial Changes

As mentioned above, the topic has definitely narrowed to focus only on the user experience of the employee. I have updated the schedule accordingly, removing all the visual component items regarding the manager UI.

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”
-Michel Foucault

How I Spent My Time

This week has been focused on bibliographic research. I combed through all the research I had gather for previous iterations of thesis topics; I was surprised the activity yielded little that was useful to the current topic.

I moved my efforts to combing my collection of books, my workplace’s collection of books, and the scholarly databases (i.e. J-Stor and Lexis-Nexis) as accessed via the SCAD Library website. The latter was extremely fruitful. Perhaps too fruitful; I have a lot of articles stored up that I need to start reading through.

What’s Working

Immediately developing and frequently updating design principles. It is an effective exercise in summarizing what I have learned and how that knowledge should influence how I move forward with the project. The latest iteration of the principles can always be found here.

Scholarly journals, of course. To be more specific, I am finding a lot of useful information on the topics of organizational trust, workplace privacy, and workplace surveillance.

Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing is awesome for research. Of course, the topic is appropriate, but the organization schema of short, 1-4 page “theses” on different facets of the topic makes it very simple to index.

Taking a break every 30 minutes.

Evernote is amazing for gathering, tagging, reviewing, and making notes on bibliographic research—especially online articles.

What’s Not Working

Planning my day on the same day. I need to start planning the day before—at least.

I got a later start on bibliographic research than what I had planned. Fortunately, I still have a solid week, and all I am really after at this point is developing a broad stance that is only specific enough to refine my general outline and successfully initiate user research.

Substantial Changes

I think my topic might be narrowing to focus primarily on the employee interface of the tracking system. This is on account of the highly democratic design principles I am developing in current research.

Similarly, I think my focus might also be narrowing in on combatting current negative aspects of the likely future of personnel tracking. The perceived sociological risks of such systems pose the biggest hurdles. While I would like to focus on the potential benefits of such a system, research is showing there are an infinite number of benefits that change depending on the specifics of a workplace.

Nevertheless, I am sure a number of benefit types will likely crop up in my research and will undoubtedly play a role in my research and design.

 “This sense that the FBI was omnipresent was its own kind of power.”
-Tim Weiner

How I Spent My Time

I created the thesis website/blog. My previous thesis website was hacked and rendered pretty useless. However, there was not much of use anyhow due to the shift in my thesis topic.

In setting up the new website, I uploaded several key documents: abstract, schedule, overview. I spent quite a bit of time revisiting these items, making some tweaks.

Other than that, I was out of town for much of the week and without internet access—which was nice for a few days.

What’s Working

Combining the thesis website and blog into one site. Hopefully this model will work for the duration of the project.

Twitter Bootstrap theme/framework for WordPress FTW.

What’s Not Working

I feel like I am spending too much time getting things set up and formatted correctly. Hopefully it will save me time in the long run, and it wasn’t just procrastination.

I was scheduled to begin bibliographic research this week. I didn’t.

Substantial Changes

Nothing to report. Staying the course.