Design Research Dissertation - Draft Dissertation

Kyra Binti Rizal Hamzah / 0337085 /Design Research Dissertation / March-July 2021

Week 1

Module introduction.

Task: Literature review matrix and table of contents for dissertation draft.

To make it easier for me to group the findings in the matrix into specific topics and subtopics,  I color coded them.

Week 2

I started writing my literature review alongside some other sections of my draft and the feedback I received was:

• Find the common themes in the literature review matrix and arrange them in the draft in a way that has a sort of flow
• Restructure the introduction, try write some bullet points to make it easier

Week 3

Finished up my lit review! Dr Yati didn't have much feedback during the tutorial as she needed time to read but what she did mention was:

• Make sure language / spelling is consistent - use either British or American spelling and don't mix up use of both ( I'm using British spelling as that's what I've been taught in school )
• Paraphrase don’t just cut/paste things from the literature
• Reflect on word choices
• Introduce articles or subtopics mentioned in the literature review
• Correlate the reviews to the topic, add your own reasoning and synthesise findings

I had a bit of a discussion with Dr Yati regarding that last point of adding your own findings to the reviews - What I had learnt in another module (Introduction to Psychology, which I took as part of my complementary studies) is that your review should mainly serve as a summary of everything you read, without any of your own input. She then told me that it's based on the preference of your supervisor and that typically American style papers would more often be just summaries while the British style of writing would allow more room to be critical.

Week 5 

This week was the interim deadline for sections 4 and 5. 

As I was absent last week, the feedback I received this week reflected on both sections 2 and 3

• Add blog link to progress sheet
• Lit review 2.1 and 2.3.2. had incomplete citations (year but no name)
• Add labels to all the figures/diagrams
• Put the qualitative survey data from section 4 in a table

Week 6

Draft dissertation deadline!

Feedback:

• Finish Conceptual framework / 1.4
• Fix grammar like hyphens etc
• Add section 7 project recommendations
• centralise figures
• are there figures needed for section 2?

My draft:

Week 12

After the submission of the draft in week 6, Dr Hayati took some time to read over our submissions and return them with her comments. After that I had a couple of edits to make,mostly related to grammar or referencing format. Some of the more major areas I had to fix were the flow of my conceptual framework as well as the recommendations, as my recommendation section was a bit unclear on whether I was making suggestions for researchers or for designers.

Revised / Final dissertation

I then submitted it on turnitin and there was only a 3% similarity, most of which was made up of the text on the cover page.