Primary Observation

Last week I was down in London beginning my observational fieldwork at St Pancras Station. I was able to spend a couple of days in the space, and get a feeling of how people were acting in the environment. I was most aware of the amount of people still working/communicating whilst on the move. These "mobile workers" came in various forms, from the businessman/woman working on a laptop at any opportunity to someone simply on talking/texting on their mobile phone whilst on the move. It was just something that stood out to me, and something to consider during my analysis. It was also intriguing to see how people adapted the space and objects within the space to suit their needs.

My next step will be to do an initial round of analysis/synthesis to see what stands out.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Found this short clip from William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces". It's has some really interesting observations of human behaviour, but sadly this is the only clip available. Chris said that the book of the same title is definitely worth a read as well.

Interactions in the Urban Environment

I'm still researching into interactions in the urban environment for my project in the Summer. I read The street as platform by Dan Hill at City of Sound.

I really liked the narrative account he portrayed to describe the "data cloud" that has become invisible to us as we go about our daily lives.

"We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. This is cross-referenced with playlist data emerging from their three iPods. Similar performance data is being captured in the engine control systems of a stationary BMW waiting at a traffic light, beaming information back to the BMW service centre associated with the car’s owner."

It was a fascinating read, and reminded me of some science fiction writing, like Snow Crash, which I read a couple of years ago in relation to an undergrad project on the future of interactive entertainment. However, as Dan states, this is not fictional and the technology described is either already in place, or could be used for the concepts illustrated. 

It is interesting how he mentions that systems will be rarely used if they are not adequate or suitable for the user's needs:

"An on-street information kiosk stands beside the screen, offering a scrollable map of the local area and directory of local businesses. It’s little-used, as the directory of businesses was always incomplete and intermittently updated, its data now rusty and eroded by time."

Being Human

Yesterday afternoon we met with Richard Harper, a senior researcher at Microsoft, as well as attending the public lecture he gave in the evening titled Changing Humans. 

It was interesting to hear him talk about understanding how people think, and how this can be aided by developing an understanding of how you think yourself. He related this to the conversations between designers and non designers, and said that it can involve creating a common ground together.

I liked the point he made when describing communication as a human act, as in some environments it can be interpreted as an exchange of data, with humans seen as machines. However he also stressed that neither of these are necessarily wrong, but are simply a different viewpoint.

I thought about this a bit more while we were discussing reflection, and reflective writing with Jonathan Baldwin in the first session of the Designing Innovative Research module. When describing the action of making a cup of tea or brushing your teeth most people will go through the process in a systematic way. We were encouraged to question why you do certain things in order to evaluated and reflect on the action i.e. why do you have a cup of tea? I though back to what Richard Harper had said and realised that often when people make a cup of tea or coffee, they are not doing it because they are thirsty and need a drink, but it is like a performance. They do it to take a break, gain comfort, or even to make a social gesture. People don't go for coffee to drink coffee; they go to have a chat.

I think I would like to relate this to my ideas for my 3rd semester project, and particularly the social interaction aspect of design.

Space and Place

I've been doing a bit more research in relation to the DE project, which we'll hopefully be finding out more about next week. I've tried to divide my research into three main areas:

• People (and their behaviour)
• The space and it's environment 
• The object or interactive system involved.

I found this paper, which deals with social interactions in public spaces. It was geared towards researching possible frameworks for mobile information systems. I like how they have structured their research and hopefully I can take some of this into how we manage our task as a group.

Whilst thinking about people's behaviour in space I remembered a blog entry I came across last year on desire paths. I always find these desire paths captivating, it helped me realised how people will make a space work for them, even if the design of it impedes them. It's visual evidence of where a designer has "imposed their own will onto the site, as opposed to finding a solution that accounts for the wants and “desires” of the users." I think it will be interesting to also look into urban, environmental and architectural design in relation to the project.

Desire Path - Flickr

In relation to objects and interactive systems, I am often drawn back to my roots in interaction design. I find it hard to get away from looking at big interactive systems like display screens and a lot of the examples on Interactive Architecture. I do like a lot of this stuff, although sometimes I feel these interactive pieces can verge too much on the art side of things and fail to acknowledge an actual requirement.

I did find this blog Interactive Displays in Public Spaces, which had some interesting insights, particularly in regards to zones and behaviours around the displays. There's a link to a good write-up on SlideShare, with some useful diagrams.

Diagram of interactive display in public space