After conducting our research and empathizing the next step in our project was to define our problem. Define is when the designer can identify what the main problem is they are trying to solve and make connections based on the research gathered from before. During our research phase we created a survey which was sent to students on our campus to hear about their encounters and observations of cyberbullying. From that we were able to learn most people had either been directly by cyberbullying or knew someone who had been. Instagram and Facebook were the most common answers for when we asked people where they encountered cyberbullying the most. But one of the biggest things we learned was people were unaware that cyberbullying did exist on their campus. This helped us to realize that we needed to address awareness of cyberbullying in our research question.
Originally we thought we wanted to help cyberbullying victims directly but we realized that spreading awareness would help create more of an impact by stopping cyberbullying at the source. Through our research we were able to discover things that may not have been considered cyberbullying by most people and so that was a big thing we brought up in the define stage. People could be seeing cyberbullying on social media and the internet and not even know it so that is something people should be aware of. The research question we were able to come up with thanks to the define stage was “how might we spread awareness of cyberbullying in colleges?”
