I would like to discuss the different stages of development throughout the project. My approach from the beginning was to attempt many small projects that would come together to form a rich collection of research material. This philosophy worked well and it continued for the duration.

Following this structure did allow for lots of change in the way that I designed research methods and this meant that the ideas evolved a lot from the beginning. The initial aim was to gather an insight into common fears and anxieties and I did this through postcards and photos. From these I felt I was only touching the surface of the subject matter and so tried to dig deeper and question the participants more. The cultural probes and focus groups really helped in this way because they gave me many perspectives on issues that I had been considering alone. However, they did stray slightly from what I had proposed because they dealt more with reasons behind anxiety and what factors provoke it. This was not a bad thing and I learnt a lot from these methods.

Following on from this I wanted to learn more about the environments that people become anxious in to see if there was a correlation. This issue was also raised previously and had sparked a lot of questions that I wanted to explore. 

In the later stages I wanted the methods that I used to try and engage more with the participants. This had always been my intention but I realised that I hadn’t fully made this happen. I was also inspired by traditional ways of dealing with anxiety such as worry dolls:

“There is a story that when the maya Indians of Guatemala have worries, they tell them to worry people and then out them under their pillows at night. By morning the worry people have taken their worries away.”

This traditional way of dealing with worries relates to the core principals of my project. I think that the psychological act of passing on a worry (or fear or anxiety) to someone, even if they don’t really exist, is what brings relief.  This is what influenced the physical nature of my research the whole way through. What I aimed to achieve through exploring accepted ways of sharing fears and anxieties is that it is possible to have an effect on negative feelings through social interaction.

Without attempting to experiment with so many different forms of information gathering I would not have progressed so far. Although not every decision that I made necessarily improved the research I was gathering, they all helped me move on to the next stage and improved my research skills.