Course: Product Design And Technology
Supervisor: Kellie Morrissey
Name of Research Project/Activity: Keeping Fit And Staying Safe Online - a project about keeping women safe while they post and engage with online fitness content.
Q) Can you tell me a bit about yourself, your background, and why did you decide to study the course you are taking at UL?
My name is Maria Kazimierczak and I moved last year from Poland to study at UL. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, since at that time I was recovering from a serious accident, but I took the chance.
There were few factors that contributed to my decision of taking the Product Design and Technology course at UL. First of all I knew that I wanted to do something with science and if I could incorporate my passion to drawing and creating things into it as well I would be able to really enjoy my time at university. Second, I had family friends in the city. Moving abroad without knowing anyone can be hard, so having this safety buffer really helped me out and made me feel more at ease. Now I can say I really made the right decision deciding to study in Ireland.
Q) What motivated you to apply for the Summer Bursary Programme?
At first I was unsure if I should even try, since I wanted for maybe the last time spend some more time with my family in Poland. But upon receiving an addition mail from Kellie, now my supervisor I decided to give it a go. I always wanted to try working in academic field and it was a really good opportunity to actually try it out. My dream is also to not finish my education on bachelor’s degree but to go further and study more in the fields that interest me.
Q) What are you doing as part of your research here at UL?
My research related to staying safe online, allowing women to feel safe while creating and engaging with fitness content - putting their bodies, faces and workout routines on display. This content often generates harassment directed at women as well as being a source of more personal struggles, such as being "good enough", or showing one's true self and comparing themselves to others.
As part of this research I did many different things. I read and analysed previously published research papers related to the research I’m taking part in. Some of these were focused on digital media design, dark patterns with UX and UI design, and others more focused on social aspects of online communities (mostly focused on women and fitness) and the influence of online engagement on Generation Z. I also did a feature analysis, benchmarking, a product feature matrix regarding fitness content posting on different online platforms and forums, as well as the platforms themselves that we use in our daily life’s, ones like Instagram, reddit, TikTok and YouTube. Following that, my task was to analyse online content and discourse around social media creators. All of the data collected from that analysis was finalised by organising it into themes and subthemes and based on it initial design sketches were created and rendered for the purpose of incorporating them into real-life scenarios.
The final design consisted of three distinct storyboards telling stories of women’s struggles while navigating and creating the digital space as well as improvements that could be incorporated into that space.
Q) What skills have you developed over the summer?
I certainly developed more research skills. Comprehensive reading of academic papers, longer presentation creating skills, creating labels for my findings and segregating them into smaller, easier to understand groups, annotation skill for the analysed content, further ideas sketching skills and presentation skills.
Q) What has this experience taught you and what would you recommend it to others?
I would happily recommend taking part in Summer Bursary Programme to others, it is a great opportunity to develop essential research skills and actually see if you’d enjoy working in that field. It can also help you with your field of study, since it teaches you some nice study practices you could implement into your own life, it allows you to talk and learn from people with more experience and gives you the opportunity to actually talk with them about your interests and your further career ideas.
This experience taught me a lot, it really showed me that I enjoy the research and developing new ideas further, it taught me how to manage my time both for work and for family. It helped me develop new skills I probably will be using in my everyday study as well.
Q) What are your future career plans, would you consider a career in research?
Yes, of course. I really enjoyed working in research over the summer and I think I could stay in that field and continue my career in research moving forward. I don’t have any plans that are set in store, but I would love to explore the design for medical field and maybe try to learn a bit about biomedical engineering. I would also love to work in a internationally collaborative field when I could possibly meet up and share my ideas with people from all over the globe.