I543 Interaction Design Methods | Spring 2014 Assignment 10: Visual Ethnography
Corrie Colombero
Tianjie Li
Leasing office lady
“When we open, we check our emails, to see if there is any contacts from interested people and respond to them and go through any applications we received. Right now we are in the process to assign the apartments to people who are in the waiting list.�
Subject description The first place we went was Woodbridge leasing office and interviewed one lady working there. She was a middle-aged lady and very welcoming to us which could be because of her job. As we asked her to focus on her work, she went through several basic work tasks that she does everyday. When we asked her to state what kind of work she does everyday, she stated several activities such as checking emails, applications, and giving tours. When she is done with her daily routine, she didn’t have much more to say; she seemed to get bored easily when there was not a lot of work to be done. Concepts 1. Smart mug In the leasing office, coffee is one of the few drinking options for the employees and it is annoying to fulfill the coffee frequently. Thus we design a smart mug for the employees. There is a line on the mug and when the coffee surface is beneath the line, the mug will automatically remind the coffee machine to make coffee for the employees if there’s no coffee left in the machine.
2. Smart screen The woman in the leasing office claimed that when she finished all the work, she has nothing to do, and it’s really boring. However, it is hard for her to do anything other than work, for her computer screen faces out towards other employees so they can always see what she’s doing. This computer screen can distinguish between one’s own eyes and the eyes of others. So with this feature activated you can do whatever you want on your computer and whenever someone else’s eyes look at your screen...it switches to your work.
Barbershop employee
“This lady under the dryer now has long hair. The one I did this morning had hair down to her waist and she wears her hair in a bun, all week...and uh I’ll take it up so you can see her rollers. Smile! ...and she’s been my friend for like, um 40 years, and I’ve done hair for 41.”
Subject description We visited Design Studio Hair and interviewed a lady that has been doing hair for over 40 years. She talked with us while sitting in the seat that her customers usually sit in to get their hair cut. Then she walked over and lifted the hair dryer on her customer/friend and showed us her hair in rollers. She was a delightful woman and seemed very happy with her job. Concepts 3.Virtual Reality Hair Dryer It takes a long time for hair to dry and the only entertainment provided is magazines sitting on a table. This concept is a Virtual Reality attachment to the dryer so people can watch videos or play games while their hair is drying.
4.Hairstyle pictures There are currently a lot ofpictures hanging on the wall in the shop showing different hairstyles. In our concept, when the customer walks in front of the picture, it will show the effect of the customer with this kind of hairstyle.
Coffee house employee
“Crowd control and making people happy, making them feel welcome. It gets busier as it gets toward the weekend, and the rain does one of two things, it either slows us down or it speeds us up.�
Subject description We went to the Bakehouse for breakfast and interviewed with one of the employees there. The employee was working the front counter as well as making espresso drinks. He was very busy and constantly waking back and forth from the counter (taking orders) to the espresso and bakery area. He talked with us inbetween customer orders and as he was making espresso drinks. Concepts
5. Interactive Menu Inside of this cafe, there is only a written listing of available choices and very few pictures on the menu board. It is hard for the customers to know what exactly the food looks like. So we created a mobile app that when the customers hold up their phone to the items on the menu board, it automatically shows the real pictures of the menu items taken by other customers.
6.Easy Order The employee had to keep going back and forth from making coffee drinks to taking orders. We created a screen on the counter so the customers can choose the food they like by pressing the items. Under each picture of food, there will be an order to show which food are customer favorites. There is also an order list on the left side for the employee to check.
Clothing store Assistant Manager
“We do a lot of things. We buy clothing, we tag it, we backstock it, we put it out on the floor, we do more than the average retail clothing store, I think.�
Subject description We visited Plato’s Closet and talked to the Assistant Manager behind the counter. She was entering clothing into to her computer that she had recently purchased. We observed her doing this sorting/ inputting process for different items of clothing (which was very time consuming) and trying to help customers at the same time.
Concepts 7. Clothes recognition When the employees put the clothes in front the computer screen, the computer can automatically recognize what type of clothing it is, input it into the database, and print out a price tag. This helps speed up the process of work to be done behind the counter by the employees so more time can be spent helping customers.
$10
8. Lucky Lights We observed a lot of dull lighting inside the store. We designed a fun way to engage regular customers and attract more customers. Certain lights in the store will change color at different times to indicate different sales. In this case, the lights turned purple so the customer will get 50% off the price.
Stock worker
“I am doing odds and ends everyday here. And, haha, I nearly do everything. For example, today I am going to label all the goods here in these paper boxes. The tools I use for this work are the price gun, and that...um...knives to open the paper boxes. But I am not familiar with the price, and I will have to ask another guy.�
Subject description Our group’s final destination was an international market. After introducing our project and our purpose, we asked the market owner if we could take photos here about their daily work. The boss said he himself didn’t want to be photographed, but he would love to recommend some of his employees for us to take photos of as long as this was only for course use. Then he called the guy in our photo, and we were led to his work space in the market. His was working in the corner of the market with many different size boxes containing all sorts of daily goods. The boy looked like around 20 or so and was a little bit shy. Whenever we asked for some information about him, he was not likely to talk more. The only thing we know is that he’s from Anhui province and works illegally here in US. And they pay him 7.5 dollars per hour. We asked him if he could speak English and he said he couldn’t. What was interesting was that during our interview, several times he tried to use English (actually not sentences but words) to communicate with Corrie, but failed. Concepts 9.Spiderman gloves The man working in the market had to bend over to get the stuff on the floor. We designed a pair of gloves to help the worker get the items out of the boxes without having to bend over.
10.Price gun Without having to always check the price of the goods before pricing them, our design allows the worker to type or scan the goods, get the price, and then labels the goods automatically for the worker. It can be worn around the wrist so the worker can still have both hands to work with.
Reflection Corrie: We found visual ethnography to be a useful tool as we did our research in a number of different ways. Right away when entering these businesses we had a conversation topic as they immediately were curious about us holding cameras. We found most people didn’t mind us taking their pictures once they found out it was for a school project. When doing just an interview with someone you don’t always get the opportunity to take photos or record video. As we had one person doing the interviewing and the other taking photos, we were able to capture the interview in action (the photos of performing work and talking to us) which provided great insights for our research. There is a personal feeling to photos that you just don’t seem to get from any other medium. You can really spot subtleties within photographs (both visible, not visible, intended, and unintended) capturing great emotion as well. (small story) Our last stop at the market seemed to generate the most interesting bit of research as we came across workers that were working illegally. All of the conversation was spoken in Chinese, so I was unable to understand any of what was being said. I was the one taking pictures due to the communication barrier and at one point a worker was stepping out of the freezer and had a very scared look on his face when he saw me (we did not include any photos of faces out of concern and respect to the workers), and I didn’t know why he looked so scared! His boss was in the back as well, more Chinese was spoken, and then laughter ensued...After we left the market I found out that his boss had played a joke and said we were there from the newspaper taking pictures! I can only imagine this poor kid seeing an American girl taking pictures of him and thinking he was about to be put in the newspaper! After Tianjie explained it all to me, I felt so bad for scaring the crap out of the poor guy. Definitely an interesting experience to say the least!
Tianjie: I think for using photos as a way to conduct ethnographic research will generate interesting findings. For example, common people will react very differently in front of the camera. I remember when we first saw the employee in the international market, he looks tired and bored. As soon as we told him our purpose for taking photos, he became excited and was eager to showcase his work to us. And we all know that bending over to label hundreds of goods in the paper box is a really annoying thing to do, but he still tried to be active to do that. And also, I consider this method an unique way to inspire designers’ thoughts towards mundane technology. What we got from Eli’s Meaning and Form course is that the meaning of photos is not the pictures themselves or the skill of using camera and editing pictures, but the skill of communicating with people and capturing important moment which can be used for your purpose. In that case, I think taking photos of common people (or we can say users) is a way to get to know more about users, their personality, their values and lifestyles, their daily work and even what they are thinking about (through micro actions which we can hardly observe).