think carrie, think!

I’m done a little bit more than a quarter of my final year in grad school. What’s the smartest move to make now? Changing both my thesis paper and project focuses, of course! Duh.

That’s what happens when you’re supposed to make decisions on your thesis topics at the end of your first year in grad school, without doing an enormous amount of research to figure out if it’s really what you want to do. So, now that I’ve done some more thorough research, and have spent some time mulling about in various topics, I’ve finally chosen something I think I’m comfortable pursuing.

New and improved thesis project focus

I’m still looking at the Intermediary Care Unit at the Pittsburgh Children’s hospital. But instead of focusing on patient experience, I’ll be focusing more on family education. Imagine this: your five year old child has just gotten an emergency heart operation, is recovering in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit where the patient to staff ratio is 1:1—each child has their own bedside nurse. A couple days later your child is transferred to the Intermediary Care Unit, where the patient to staff ratio is now 1:3. Being a parent who isn’t in the medical field, you wonder if the sudden decrease of care and focus for your child is adequate. Of course, you know that your child should be okay, otherwise they would’ve have put him in the unit. But in the back of your mind, you’re constantly worrying, because you’re not 100% sure about what’s going on. You’re trying to keep up with everything everyone has told you, but at times it’s just information overload. Your child is discharged a week later, and you then wonder whether that was enough time to recuperate in the hospital. More importantly, you wonder whether you’ll be knowledgeable enough to be able to give your child the best care possible at home.

It’s a hard problem to tackle. Where should you begin educating the families about the condition and care of their child? What sorts of information should you be giving them and when? Organizing the information is a challenge… you can imagine all the different types of new information that a parent can acquire: dietary info, physical therapy info, respiratory therapy info, general care info, etc. In what mediums should the information be delivered? Should there be multiple channels of information delivery?

So that’s what I’ll be doing. Trying to develop some sort of service that will allow families to feel more empowered about caring for their children. Allowing them to feel more comfortable about the entire process, and allowing a more seamless transition between information transfer and gathering.

New and improved thesis paper focus

Before, I had plans of looking at musical notation systems to develop a new service notation framework. But to do this would require an explanation of why one should even look to music in the first place. Why look to music for parallels for notation systems?

Here’s the rough (very basic) outline of my paper [the real outline is at three pages right now]. Apologies in advance for the weird wordpress formatting of lists:

1. Service background
   • introducing service design as a new discipline
2. Paralleling Music to Service
   • looking at music lifecycles
   • looking at music as a system
   • looking at musical style
   • first impressions
3. Paralleling Music Roles to Service Roles
   • Introducing the notion of the following parallels:
     • composer = service designer
     • performer = service provider/frontline people
     • listener = customer
   • The Role of the Composer [or service designer]
     • master of elements
     • giving shape to ideas
     • keeping an organic relationship to his work
     • designing the unexpected
   • The Role of the Performer [or service provider]
     • reproduce composer’s intentions with conviction
     • supplying energy and movement to a piece of music
     • master of elements before taking the performance further
     • need to execute and interpret
     • need to be aware of performance conditions
     • establishing trust
   • The Role of the Listener [or customer]
     • role as an advocate/educator
     • four stages of listening:
     • hearing, enjoying, understanding, and discriminating
     • in the end, the listener wants an experience
     • role as a discriminator
     • Notation Systems
4. Notation Systems
   • Introduction: notation is necessary to tie and ground all the roles together
   • How the composer, performer, and listener relate to the music score
   • How this parallels to service
     • need for fidelity and conviction to notation system
     • limitations of notation system
5. Future direction
   • developing system notation systems by looking at music notation systems
6. Conclusion

Phew. Long post. I will be impressed if someone actually got to this point of the post ;)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 and is filed under design, music, school, service, thesis paper, thesis project.