My research is investigating ways to reduce carbon emissions from heritage buildings while retaining their heritage values, I have mostly completed my data collection and am now in the process of analysing it all.
Once again the OU Graduate School are running a research poster competition that includes a multimedia option and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to create another Playmobil video about my research, this time identifying some interim conclusions (see the previous two videos and posts here: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/playmobil-as-a-d…mmunication-tool/ and here: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/fieldwork-is-fun/ ).
Below is this year’s video!
And if you want to see the other multimedia entries and posters and vote for your favourite the link to the Graduate School site is here: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=100218 (Please note that my video is not currently displaying properly on the graduate school site, they are attempting to sort this out but luckily you can see it ‘in full technicolour’ below!)
As well as being a fun and enjoyable activity and a good excuse to retire to the loft and legitimately play, I also found this design process surprisingly useful in terms of thinking about my research. It was quite interesting to sit down and really consider how I could summarise some of my conclusions in an accessible way and in less than five minutes. Summarising two 10,000 word journal articles into a short video is tricky! I might even claim that it is useful thesis planning as it helped me to think about how the different topics should be divided and how they interacted with each other and formed a coherent story.
It was also interesting to consider how best to display some of the concepts visually, especially the more abstract concepts like ‘heritage value’ and to think about how to model the things that I don’t have in Playmobil (I understand that they do now do solar panels but I don’t have any and it wouldn’t be sustainable to buy more plastic just for a research communication video!).
All in all I found it a fun and useful exercise and I hope that it will help explain some of my research to a wider audience in an accessible way. I hope you enjoy watching it!
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