Artistic Research

One of the nicest things of doing a Master of Arts instead of a Master of Science is that you are allowed to do Artistic Research. No, this is not an oxymoron. if your fairly open minded than your reaction could be: ‘Okay, we have for instance scientific research, journalistic research and even legal research, so why not artistic research? Please tell me what peculiarities this form of research has compared with other forms!’

Tagged with: master, artistic, research,

What's on?

A typical Monday evening at our house: matthijs and I both tired of our first workday of the week, and still not totally recovered from usually a full programmed weekend, our bellies round from a lovely meal either one of us could have prepared, sitting on the couch, fighting over the remote.

Tagged with: boer zoekt vrouw, de wereld draait door, succesfactors, tv, research,

PhD research proposal; social media a marketplace for esteem?

More people than ever before interact with each other. Numerous individuals connect with friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, share their thoughts, activities and experiences on Twitter and publish, comment and rate video clips on YouTube. The latter examples depict only a small array of the social activities in which users partake using social media services. Human activities on the Internet, made possible by these social media services, continue to grow. It is not a complete surprise that companies, politicians, scholars and the popular press display a deep interest towards these social media services that facilitate human activity.

Tagged with: social media, research,

The fun begins

The research on mentality has lasted for a year now. After reading lots of papers, trying to find out what mentality really is and trying to determine six basic mentalities to come up with a segmentation tool to name one’s mentality, for me the fun part really begins now. We’re going to do some experiments. The gut feeling we have is that the mentality of a person is kind of similar to the mentality of the brand he or she prefers. So now we’re going to put that gut feeling to the test with a few experiments.

Tagged with: mentalities, research, branding,

Social Media Monitor

Got my hands on the first edition of the social media monitor. And to say it upfront: disappointing. For some reason I was excited to read this, maybe because social media is also a major topic in our own research program. Knowing how hard it is to define and model social media in order to deduce some relevant research questions, I expected new insights and some help to bring our own research one step closer to the Holy Grail. Alas!

Tagged with: paper, research, social media,

Reverse Engineering Business Models on Mobile Television

Two months ago I started my graduate research for CrossmediaLab on business models. My main focus will be the STOF-method as it was developed in the Freeband program. In March 2008 a book was published concerning the STOF method: “Mobile Service Innovation and Business Models”, which is more or less my reference source for the coming months.

Tagged with: business models, mobile, television, research,

Online communities and event experience

As a graduate student working at the CrossmediaLab the focus of my research project lies on the influence a community might have on the experience of an event. We are trying to find out if participation on a community website, regarding an upcoming event, makes the experience of the actual event and the memories of it in any way different. This would be in comparison to the experience of visitors who did not participate in the online community. The actual research question is formulated as such: “Does participation in a online community contribute to the experience of an offline event.” This research is part of the Crossmedia Atelier project.

Tagged with: highlands, research, experience,

Working Mentalities

Following up on graduation, we are still in the process of defining a workable way of logging Mentality. After a couple of months we’ve decided that we’re sticking to our six mentalities for now; Conformism, Sociality, Ambition, Hedonism, Creativity and Perfectionism. We are very much aware that this list can look incomplete at first glance, however, for now, it makes a good basis for further research. As we go along we may very well find that there’s one or maybe a couple, missing. The thing is: our definition of these mentalities are different from the way most people would interpret them. For that matter, when we first started of we interpreted them differently within the research group. We finally came to a consensus. So these can very well only be “working” mentalities.

Tagged with: mentality, research,