1(e) Documenting your process

Figure 1. Documenting your process can help others learn from your experiences (Stanley, CC BY 2.0)

Throughout the course of your project you will be gathering a lot of information. During the process of investigation you will come across useful links, documents and listen to people’s testimonials. There might be different types of diagrams, notes and journal excerpts coming out of the planning stage, and you may choose the video record or take lots of pictures while you are taking action. All of this is evidence of your work which you can later use to display your process and share it with your audience.

When collecting evidence you need to keep in mind three important things:

1. Consider your own preferences, but also your users and audience. Having a variety of evidence - images, audio files, pieces of writing - would make it easier for you when you need to make a decision at a later stage on what to include in your display, which would be appropriate and accessible for your audience.

2. Organise your materials. Depending on the types of evidence, you may need virtual and physical space to sort them out. If you are working with other people, it would be helpful to use shared folders and documents (like Google Docs/Drive, Dropbox, Slack) where you can store all useful resources and evidence. Some website-creating platforms such as Google Sites or Weebly can also be a useful tool for keeping track of your activity, as they allow you to neatly include text, pictures, embed links and animations. Padlets are another option. If some of the evidence you collect is physical, it would be best that you agree on a shared space - preferably at school - where you can store all the materials.

3. Do it regularly! It is much easier to choose what to put in your display later on if you collect your evidence and organise your materials in a timely manner rather than trying to do it at once after you are done. Allocate time after each stage for this and make sure that every member of the team does it.

There are many ways to document your process and media/formats that you can use. This is a very important process which will help you share and scale your project more effectively when you reach that stage. You may already be familiar with some platforms for documenting actions such as ManageBac, in which you write a short reflection and maybe add some other form of visual evidence. When choosing your medium for documenting your activity, consider the following:

• Your abilities and preferences. You may be very talented at drawing - why not summarize all the stages of your projects into a storyboard made up of cartoons? If you are a good speaker you could create a podcast with different episodes and even include guests. An avid photographer could create and continuously update a photo journal website, while a good writer could blog stories.

It is important to choose something you actually enjoy doing as that would make the documentation process more interesting, insightful and feel less like a chore. You can even take the opportunity to learn a new skill that you have been wanting to explore for a long time, like photography.

• The purpose of the documentation. If the project is a school-based assignment, such as a Personal Project, you may need to document it in the form of a report, adding some of the visual evidence as an appendix. This means that you would need to write down your actions regularly, but also take photos, transcribe interviews and upload all your charts, diagrams and sketches.

Similarly, if you are considering applying for a grant to fund the scaling of your project, you may need to fill out a proposal that requires specific information, such as background, objectives and actions, written in a very clear and concise way. Keeping a log of activities in the form of a website-based process journal could be very helpful in retrieving such information and a useful tool that can also be shared with the funding bodies or to showcase the information in an exhibition later.

• The audience. If the purpose of the documentation is to ultimately share it with the community of stakeholders or a broader audience, in addition to thinking about how to spark interest, you need to take into account the number of people you would like to reach. While different methods of sharing your project will be discussed in more detail later on, it is worth considering that keeping good documentation can sometimes mean skipping a step.

For example, if you decide to document the stages of your project by regularly uploading posts and images on a specially created social media page, you could share your progress as it happens, reaching a growing audience. Your page is your canvas and you can make updates and edit them as you go. Another important thing to consider when documenting your progress is accessibility. If your target audience, for example, is a group of people with visual impairment, you may need to consider relying less on images and more on text-based and audio information. You may also have multiple audiences, so consider the flexibility of the information you are documenting as you go.

Piñera, Hernán. “Photographies.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 30 Nov. 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y9tlkguj.

Stanley, David. “Saharan Rock Art.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 June 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_rock_art#/media/File:Prehistoric_Rock_Paintings_at_Manda_Gu%C3%A9li_Cave_in_the_Ennedi_Mountains_-_northeastern_Chad_2015.jpg.

“You Are Beautiful.” Padlet, 2020, padlet.com/.