Now that spring term is over, so does our lectures this term. Because during the summer, we are going to be on our own and independently researching and testing our question.

Personal check-in as per today 23 June 2025: I am so nervous and excited.

Playing With Your Research

After series of unit 2 lectures from our different tutors, at the end of the week we are connecting the dots on what have we learn so far. We learnt that we have lots and lots of diagrams with similar shapes, triangle and circles, apparently. But that’s not the point. The point is that, every lecture taught us to framing and reframing on every journey we passed on, and make it more concise using diagram visualisation so we can build a better research. Well, indeed visualisation makes the research also more fun and playful. That’s seems to be the framework of this course apparently.

Every week connected to one another and how it shaped the way we do our research. From forming our questions using triangulation, looking deeper to our research’s core and make use of multimodality to spark creativity, be confidence for doing action to proof your question, the importance of data and proof to solidified our curiosity, making the research more playful and fun using service design framework, empathized our stakeholders, funding your work and actually implement your work, removing yourself and actually dive in to your research and last but not least is time management. Well, there is another one but sadly and apologize for not coming, is talking about self management. A very well crafted series to supply ourselves for the independent study!

Like an arcade game, the series of lectures felt like a game that you need to conquered on every series before you understood the whole games. But the grasp of highlight that I personally gaines, also contributed from the BDF 2025 I was attending, is how to make this research playful. The importance of play will allow creativity to immerse and blend in to your work. Therefore, this would not only making the research fun but become a passion throughout the summer. Who knows what kind of person you have become after the summer, right?

Playing with Your People

It’s been really great how the past 2 units has shaped us, and myself personally. Together, we became friends, collaborators, teachers to each others and most importantly new family away from home.

This was taken at Maria’s party on 17th, a day before our term actually ended. MAAI and MAIM courses were, like what Goldaneh said, “collaborated” at the end for having fun and partying together. Treacherous, I must say! We went from peers, team members, collaborators, occasionally frienemies, to actually become friends we often hang out together. The phase in research and friendship can be slightly very similar to each other. Looking at these pattern, I probably should not be worrying to much at the end and should see things playfully and differently.

I will definitely miss my crazy MAAI friends during the summer, because we might not be able to meet as intense as before. But hopefully, we will still be in touch to do our project throughout the summer.

Thank you for all the tutors, course leaders, program director and all my friends in the class. We will rock this summer, shall we?

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P.s I am so excited to share my first summer destination for my research!!!