focusing on "process"

I found out that I was always fascinated by how things are formed, how ideas are shaped, how activities are motivated and executed. In short, I am obsessed by the process, the change, the event, and the activity. I believe everything is associated, and in order to have insightful analysis, we should use some kind of Actor-Network theory to examine the connections, to identifies the underlying forces, to analyze the ways these forces work together, and find the machinsims used for collaborations, fights and negotiations between these forces, thus finally keep the process going and get things transformed. I believe the power of contrast. In terms of Chinese traditional Yin Yang philosophy, I think it is important that we should identify the Yin factors as well as Yang factors, that is to find the negative forces as well as the positive forces, and be always aware that things can go wrong, and things can be done differently.

With these recognitions, I want to take the experience as the unit of analysis. The concept of experience here is similiar to the concept of process, program and activity, such as vacationing/tourism, Ph.D. or Master programs in universities, design process/prototyping, appearing and disappearing of disciplines, and etc. Since I have decided to focus on the process as the unit of analysis, and since everything is changing, all of sudden I was opened up to a wide range of possibilities to explore. Are they relevant while they obviously appear to be so diverse? Are there any underlying general principles? Are there similiar machinisms behind these processes? Are there similiar approaches to these phenomena? These are questions I don't know but am very curious about.

During each event, process, and experience, there will always be unexpectations, weird things, and misfits, to which I believe we should pay considerable attention to make sense of what's going on. News is important resource for me to find those unexpected, significant and strange phenomena around our everyday life, and I did find huge interesting topics from reading news paper in the past week.

Take tourism as an example. Here are some questions can be asked about that: Why do people would like to go traveling? The reason could be a mixture of personal, economical, social, and cultural reasons. It could be that people are stressed out from their work, so tourism is to balance the stressful work and get relaxed (kind of conform to Yin-Yang operation ). It could be from a personal curiosity, or interests of exploration, discovering, experiencing, and changing. It could be as an accessory to other activities like business trip, family reunion, celebration of milestones in life such as marriage or retiring, and attending some big events like conferences. It could be that a war keeps people from traveling for a while, and when the war is over, people can't wait to go abroad. It could be that the government want to encourage economy, and arrange a national vacation for a whole country. It could be that the competition of the tourism industry results in a lot of business promotion activities, which simulate the desire to travel. So the personal interest, time available, goverment regulation, economic conditions, cost, and quality of traveling (people certainly don't want to go the places packed with people) could all be important factors that contribute to the idea of taking a tour. It is interesting fo find out how the activity of traveling could be all connected to these underlying reasons. The alternative of traveling could be other leisure activities, such as reading, movie watching, party, and etc. It is an issue of vacationing, and it would be interesting to see how technology plays a role to let people know the commercial information from travel agencies or park administrations, how different the activity patterns are of vacationing over different countries. I believe to identify these different underlying reasons are important to understand tourists's activity patterns which certainly includes how they use technology in the whole process. For example, if the vacation is given by the goverment of the whole country, keep aware of the traveling flow is important to ensure the quality of vacation. If the traveling is from personal curiosity trying to broaden knowledge, then it is very possible that the travlers would like to check out historical information and geographical information from various sources, including websites, before, during and after the traveling. So all these will affect the activity and technology design.

Next question would be, how do they plan their trip? What information do they need to plan? How do they find that information? How do they decide where to go, how to go, where to stay? Are they informed enough before they make decision? What technologies to they use to get these information? What kind of things will they do online such as airline tickets booking, finding interesting places to go , hotel reservation, and whether checking? Do they use online forums more often? Do they use official forums more often? Are the plannings distributed to different members of the traveling group? Will they ask travel agents for information? What resources are available for them to figure out the plan and to make decisions? How the online or offline information systems could be designed more helpful, how they can complete each other?

In the process of traveling, what technologies do they use, digital cameras, mobile phones, vedios, GPS? What roles do these technologies play in the experience of traveling? Do they use cell phones a lot among group members, or beyond group members? What do they use cell phones for? How do they use wireless connections available during the travel, for work, for checking emails, for next day's itinerary or for reading news?

After the travel, what do they do to retrospect the traveling? By playing with pictures? By writing blogs? By telling stories? What information would they disclose to others?

(Still more questions to ask, but I have to stop for today because it is too late. To be continued..)