Friday 20 February 2009

LEARNING AGREEMENT.

Today was the deadline for our Learning Agreement and it is such a weight off my mind! I finally have exactly what I needed written down and I can now focus on my research.

Synopsis of study

For my final major project I will be looking into happiness and positive thinking. I will be researching this through conducting surveys and experiments on a large number of people in order to get the best results. My primary research will be supported by material from books and the Internet. I will be looking into methods of relaxation and how colour effects people’s mood using perception and looking briefly into the psychology behind it.

My aim is to encourage people to think in a more positive way. From more positive thinking, I want to encourage people to become more self-confident and reconsider how they perceive everyday life, as well as other people. This can help in stressful times, or just simply change their way of tackling the day ahead. I want to divert people from being affected by negative thoughts and reflect on positive thoughts. An exercise I will be conducting will involve a group of people recording between 5-10 good things that happened during their day in order to bypass the bad. In addition to this I will record how they felt after the exercise to see if it helped in their positive thinking. From this information I will map people’s behaviors and thoughts, which will contribute strongly to my primary research.

My target audience can effectively be massive, however, I believe that young adults aged from 18+ will benefit from being able to think more positively and could potentially affect their outlook on life. It is this age group that find it hard to relax and manipulate their way of thinking, as it is a big turning point in their lives and are faced with a lot of different things. I am not trying to persuade people to forget their problems, but to consider there are other ways of dealing with them using positive thinking.

I am aware that there are a lot of self help books in existence already, however I aim to produce something in a different form, using the same technique. A simple quote or short phrase is something that can and will stick in someone’s head if it is effective enough. I aim to develop a small variety of these, which will be enhanced by the overall design and use of colour. I will produce a small collection of postcards, which can effectively be supported by other media to form my final piece. In order to put it into practice I will conduct one last survey from a separate group of people to gain some feedback on how effective my work has been and whether or not it has inspired positive thinking.

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