Below is the Unit 1 assessment feedback in full, along with the actions I’m taking as a result.
1. Prioritising qualitative feedback over data visualisation
“Your decision to focus on and prioritise the qualitative feedback rather than a data visualisation approach reflects the considered and reflective nature of your practice. We are excited to see how you might analyse and use this to inform what happens next.”
Action: Summarise the qualitative data in a structured table. Look for recurring themes, surprising responses, and anything that challenges my assumptions about what people experience during the counting.
2. Longitudinal study
“How might the research benefit from a longitudinal study approach? What might be revealed tracking the same participants over time? Measuring whether the ‘doorway’ moment leads to sustained practice?”
Action: Capture users email addresses at the end of the survey form, add to a database/mailing list and share a method to have more control over thoughts. This could be via email sequence including links to content such as daily practice guides, interviews, videos and online/in person workshops. Track how participants engage with the resources and content over time to measure the ‘sustained practice’.
3. Tensions in the work
“You recognise that ‘mindfulness’ branding has become simultaneously over-saturated and class-coded and that the work is partly about the commodification of contemplation and its failure to deliver genuine transformation. Meanwhile you draw on your design background to use the same tools that are used to create desire and lack. We encourage you to continue playing and testing these tensions.”
Action: Make this tension more explicit in how I write and talk about the work – in press, in the artist statement, and in the next iteration of the questionnaire.
4. Meaningful change
“What is your minimum threshold for meaningful change, and how would you ever know you have reached it? While this experience will not change participants’ material conditions, if one participant after the experience decides to research and takes up meditation is that meaningful enough?”
Action: One participant taking up meditation isn’t enough. I want the project to create genuine value for as many participants as possible – that’s its purpose. But I need to define what that actually means in measurable terms. Ie. Is it a percentage of participants reporting a shift in how they relate to their thoughts? A number who follow up with a sustained practice? I don’t have a precise answer yet, and part of the next stage is working out what evidence I’d actually need to see.
5. Questionnaire design
“How might you experiment with prompts/framing of questions in the questionnaire post the count? How will you balance prompts designed to guide reflection and discovery, with prompts that help/guide at the insight – how do you balance the risk of manufacturing the insight with hints to the viewer?”
Action: Design two or three questionnaire variants with different levels of guidance. Test them at the next activation and compare the quality of responses.
6. Distinguishing genuine insight from novelty
“How will you distinguish between a participant who experienced genuine insight and one who simply found the experience pleasant or novel? Does it matter? What does your qualitative data need to contain to be analytically useful? Is there enough word/character count in the written section?”
Action: Linked to ‘Longitudinal study’. Keep refining the questionnaire variants to ensure the data collected is analytically useful but more importantly the questions lead to insights and act as a doorway to meaningful change.
7. Accessibility
“As you work through design iterations of the website, when or will you incorporate accessibility guidelines? Does the current design work for someone with low vision, motor impairment, cognitive difference? Will you test it on someone with dyslexia? Someone older? And someone who uses keyboard-only navigation?”
Action: Review the site against WCAG guidelines. Test with at least one person each with low vision, dyslexia, and an older or basic device.
8. On the senses and where the work begins
“As you experiment with physical installations of the work, consider where the work or sensing actually begins or could actually begin… how might you start bringing in other senses to see how these interact and impact the experience? If the five aggregates begin with form (the body), what would it mean to reverse the order — to start with sensation, with the body in space — and what would that demand of the installation format?”
Action: Research artists and installations that use sensory entry points before the exercise begins. Begin sketching what an element of the ThoughtCounter experience could look and feel like using smells, sounds, sensations etc.
Next steps
Cross reference the unit 1 assessment feedback here with the post show ideas for next iteration and create a 12 week plan, grouping similar points together and highlighting the area of the user journey for clarity.