Assignment 8: Due 4/15

In order to make a persuasive argument for your proposal in Design Project 2, you will need to be able to effectively organize and convey the information you collect during your ethnographic research of the communities and organizations you are collaborating with. This assignment is intended to give you an opportunity to quickly experiment with ways of expressing how people utilize the spaces in which they live or work, as well as how they allocate their time in a typical day.

For Thursday 4/15, please complete the following:

Choose a person you know and request some time from them to conduct the brief sociological study described below. For convenience this may be simply a friend of yours, though if you have reached a level of access with your Design Project 2 community / organization members, please feel free to work with them instead.

1. Take a photograph of your subject (the person you've chosen), and a separate photo of one of "their" spaces - their home, their desk, their office, etc - such that the objects in this space are clearly visible. Interview your subject about how these objects fit into their lives and use short quotations to annotate the photo of their space (for example, "Coffee Table: I never use this table - it pretty much just collects dust and junk mail. Really, I'm not sure why I still have it!") Lay out this information on an 11x17 page.

Analyze the information you collect from this process and look for trends. Create a few categories (for example, you might come up with categories such as "useful objects" and useless objects," or "handmade items," "gifts from family" and the like) and either color code your annotations or create lists on the side of the page.

2. Interview your subject about how they typically spend their time in this space. Look for trends in how they allocate time and create a graph on a second 11x17 sheet that expresses a trend that you find interesting (for instance, you might graph the hours they are awake against the hours of daylight and find that this person is nearly nocturnal).

For Friday 4/16:

Email me a list of the ethnographic research methods (photos,video,interviews,focus groups,note-taking, etc.) that you anticipate will be the most relevant to work on Design Project 2. For each method please provide a few sentences describing how you plan to employ the method in your research.

That's it! Let me know if anyone still has questions about the deliverables.