Week 2 - post week independent study

Since Friday I have been talking to some mums and what's been interesting is that my findings are not revealing that they find driving stressful so it will be interesting to see what Hannah comes up with when we meet up on Tuesday.

I did some other research into women + driving and collated all my best findings into a document:

“It's driving her mad”: Gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological health

http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/science/article/pii/S0167629611000853?np=y

Over the past decade or so, economists have begun to consider how data on well-being and psychological health can help to address important economic questions

virtually no consideration has been given to the role of commuting.² This is somewhat surprising because commuting is an important part of the day for those who work, and psychologists have long recognised the potentially detrimental effect of this particular activity (Koslowsky et al., 1995). 

This should be seen alongside a more general concern with levels of stress and psychological problems amongst the working population, which seem to arise from the ever-increasing demands on our time and problems with maintaining an appropriate work-life balance (Taylor, 2001).

commuting is a major cause of stress arising from its unpredictability and perceived loss of control (Evans et al., 2002,Gottholmseder et al., 2009 and Koslowsky et al., 1995). 

Putnam (2000) cites commuting as a major cause of increased social isolation, which in turn leads to unhappiness. On the other hand, some commentators have pointed out the potential positive aspects of the daily commute, providing precious time alone to work, read or think, or simply to wind down from the working day (Lyons et al., 2007, Ory and Mokhtarian, 2005 and Redmond and Mokhtarian, 2001). This is likely to depend on the time spent commuting, the mode of transport and the degree of control over the journey exercised by the individual.

Our results show that, even after all these variables are considered, commuting still has an important detrimental effect on the psychological health of women, but in general men are not affected, and this result is robust to numerous different specifications. We explore possible explanations for this gender difference and can find no evidence that it is due to women's shorter working hours or weaker occupational position. Rather women's greater sensitivity to commuting time seems to be a result of their larger responsibility for day-to-day household tasks, including childcare and housework. 

Commuting is an important and ever-increasing part of how we use our time. In 1997, the average worker in Britain commuted for 48 min per day; in 2006 this had increased to 54 min, or 12% of a standard full-time working week (National Travel Survey, 1997, 2006). This trend is not unique to the UK; in Spain commuting times have increased from 31 to 34 min over the same period, in Holland from 42 to 49 min, in Italy from 22 to 35 min and in the US from 44 to 51 min (although in France and Germany commuting times do not seem to have increased).³

women tend to work shorter hours and earn a lower hourly wage than men; hence the monetary cost of commuting is relatively more expensive for women, and their travel time has a higher relative weight. On the other hand women's lower wages mean that the opportunity costs of time spent commuting will be lower than for men, and also women's shorter hours may mean fewer days at work, thus less commuting time. Also women are more likely to work in lower status service sector occupations, which are more geographically dispersed than other jobs thus increasing their chances of finding employment closer to home (Hanson and Johnston, 1985 and MacDonald, 1999).⁶

women tend to provide the bulk of domestic work and childcare and to be secondary wage earners (Blau and Ferber, 1992). The former will mean they have less flexibility in their time use on a day-to-day basis (this may account for women's higher valuation of time relative to men (Madden and White, 1980)

Predicting risky and angry driving as a function of gender

http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/science/article/pii/S0001457506001722?np=y 

Children in the car bring about special challenges, given their potential to elicit distraction and frustration in drivers. Additionally, the occurrence of a car accident with children involved raises grave implications. Overall, there is ample rationale for researchers to pay attention to the female driving experience, and particularly, those aspects of it that may increase the odds for harmful outcomes.

Week 2 - Friday

Lecture this morning did a really good job of outlining submission hand ins so I'm feeling more comfortable with those.

Then up into studio time, Hannah and I discussed our journey maps. I had identified i my own of the young professional women, that this profile doesn't give us as many opportunities whereas the working mum profile Hannah had mapped up seemed to have way more opportunity moments that we could potentially hone in on. I also didn't feel like the young professional women reflected the issue of equality that had spurred our desire to look into females as a group so we decided that working mums was going to be our direction.

From here we discussed how the shift of women moving into the workforce has been a great thing for female independence, but as well as having these new work responsibilities women are still expected to take care of the home - managing both her personal and professional life when there are not enough hours in the day, and not enough opportunities to enjoy personal time/hobbies.

The ability to do more has resulted in women having more to do!

A woman's work is never done.

We then formulated some questions that we'd like to chat to the mums in our lives about in order to better understand our audience.

I'm feeling much better about the project now that I feel a sense of direction.

When we spoke to Mark about how the 5 ways to well being fits into it all, he ran through it with us and what I got from it was that well being is the overarching theme for our project and will come through more in the response/solution stage rather than the initial profiling stage. This was great because it took some of the pressure of as I really wasn't understanding how yet to fit those in.

Hannah and I then decided that we would be best to get stuck into research and this is what I came across:

http://www.vagabomb.com/struggles-lady-driver/
This website has a really funny but insightful article on 10 Struggles You Face When You're a Lady Driver:
1. When you’re going at top speed, some guy will use all the power possible to accelerate and overtake you.

2. When you park correctly, people can’t help but be surprised about how you managed to do it in one go.

3. When you overtake someone, it becomes their life’s mission to be in front of you. No matter what.

4. When you change lanes, you’re judged.

5. When you stick to your lane, you’re judged.

6. When you’re reverse parking, people magically appear from nowhere to guide you.

7. When at a paid parking, the parking attendant will automatically presume he should park for you.

8. When you drive slowly, it’s a honk-fest. When you drive fast it’s a dipper-fest.

9. When you're stuck in traffic, creepy guys adjust their mirrors to stare at the outnumbered species on the road.

10. But whatever happens, when you reach home safe, you feel way luckier than women who have to use public transport.

Then I found some other interesting insights about women and driving in an article on the guardian https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/01/female-drivers-saudi-arabia-stamford-hill-ban-independence:

-Saudi Arabia ban women from driving

-the ability to drive signals women's move out of the domestic sphere and into the wider world (Hannah and I believe this is slightly wrong though as rather than moving out of the domestic sphere she has just double her spheres and now moves between the 2)

-with this shift into the working world comes a challenge to men's perceptions of power - to their social authority, financial clout, and sexuality.

-car is seen as emblem of sexual potency so women driving is perceived as them claiming sexual independence.

I find it really interesting that yes women have come a long way in terms of equality and independence but this does make me wonder if there will ever be a time when things are truly equal. And to be honest, I don't know if it should be, I somewhat like that there are men's roles and women's roles as it makes things simple. It's the mindset that needs altering, the mindset that women are less than men is the problem, however I feel that I am getting slightly off topic now.

Hannah and I have each tasked ourselves to talk to some of the mums in our lives and also do some secondary research so that on Tuesday we can start to form some ideas for the Visual brief (audience, situation/topic, insight, provocation).



We then had our first EX-CHANGE session.

When discussing my project I got a lot of great feedback from Bethany who used to nanny and had some really useful insights into driving with children on board and dropping them at schools.
She mentioned the stress of safety and how at primary schools and where there are young children around you have to be super alert as you never know if a kid's gunna run out in front of you and there are so many variable that could go wrong. She also told me about a rule that she'd heard of from family's with lots of children, where when getting out of the car there was a "hand on the car rule" in which all the kids would stand with one hand on the car until the mother was out and ready to go. She mentioned that there is much more to it especially if you're dealing with really young kids and you have to unbuckle them and get out strollers etc and still watch the other young children.
To be honest she made it sound like a nightmare, and that was a super useful insight for me.

Week 2 - midweek independent study

After class on Tuesday, Hannah and I completed our collaboration agreement and discussed what we would each have done before Friday's class. We decided to each do a separate journey map for two different potential audiences. We liked the idea of looking at professional/working women and so we decided that I would generate a journey map for a young professional women (mid 20's, single, works in the city - lives in the suburbs) and Hannah would generate a journey map for a working mum (mid 30's, married with 3 kids, works in the city - lives in the suburbs). Our other task was to set up our blogs/reflective diaries, which I had to help Hannah with a bit as this whole concept of blogging is completely new to her.

Below is my journey map for the young professional woman:

What I identified after completing this was that the idea that had sparked interest with Hannah and I when we completed the SLIP approach in class was the male/female equality issue and how alternatives like walking and cycling etc aren't easy options for females compared to males in terms of the appearance pressures for professional women. My journey map for Jane didn't really reflect this and it made me wonder how we could return to that idea.

Rather than take the angle that driving is stressful, could we propose that the alternatives to driving are not appropriate for working women?

Collaboration Agreement

After class on Tuesday, Hannah and I went down to Tussock and completed our collaboration agreement. In general we didn't find this document particularly helpful to us as other than agreeing to shared ownership and signing to say that we would participate equally etc, we agreed that setting tasks at the ned of each class was the easiest way for us to go about this project together.

Week 2 - Tuesday

Class today was a great opportunity to learn some different methods to try and define an audience group/consolidate our findings.
The first method we were taught was S.L.I.P (sort. label. integrate. prioritise.)

With a bunch of post it notes in hand a little cubby of wall space we tried out this method.

After completing our own SLIP theory, we then walked around and had a look at what others had come up with.

It was interesting seeing some like this:

Which had identified some of the same issues as us, despite different perspectives.

We then were briefed on the Empathy Map technique and gave that a go.

We created a persona: Jane, and thought about what she sees/hears, what she thinks, how she feels, and what she does/believes. From there we were instructed to note down Insights, Barriers and Goals.

Hannah and I didn't find this task the easiest but it did help us in terms of defining a persona, in order to realise that we needed to re-think and re-define our audience and perspective.

Week 1

Week 1 was a very vague introduction to the assignment with an initial briefing of well-being. It was kind of hard to conceptualise how it all linked together without the brief, but the lecturers were pretty set on withholding that so I tried to just engage in what they were saying.

In the Tuesday studio we read over the 3 articles/angles we had to choose from and I felt instantly connected to the driving stress angle as my boyfriend is a tradesman so is driving a lot and I see his stress. So my first direction was to think about ideas around tradesman and driving stress and talk to him and find out his thoughts/feelings. My initial thoughts were that trades people need to get places quickly and should they be of a higher importance to other drivers on the road? Trades people also often know shortcuts/where there are roadworks etc - could they share these "trade secrets"?
I also thought about who else driving stress affects: parents, young drivers, friends/family, bus drivers, taxi/uber drivers.

On the Friday we got paired up and I was a little bit disappointed in the fact that this was a group assignment as my partner was not at all interested in looking at tradesmen as a specific audience.
So over the weekend I tried to come up with some general insights.
How much time a day is spent driving?
How do drivers treat each other on the road?
What kind of pressures are put on people to get places quickly?
NZ driver stats (https://e2nz.org/nz-facts-stats/road-crash-data/):
-New Zealand has the second highest country in the world for deaths resulting from car occupant collision
-The toll is so high that the British FCO has issued an advisory to its citizens about New Zealand

What causes drivers' stress? Traffic, cops, speed cameras/limits, other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists...
What helps? Radio, talking to someone else in the car or via handsfree...
Tips from brake.org.nz:
-clear your mind of personal/work problems before getting behind the wheel
-learn to accept the things that bother you
-calm controlled breathing helps to relieve muscle tension and therefore lowers stress
-ensure the drivers seat, head rest and steering column are correctly adjusted to you
-eat sensibly - hangriness/hunger can affect concentration