Design Ethnography 2015: Fieldwork exercises April 17 and 20

The sites and the tasks: participating in order to write Kaisaniemi (metro and surrounding/adjacent mall shops); Kamppi (metro and bus station and surrounding/adjacent shops in the mall) Do your observations in your teams, participating in the setting as you find useful, but… – First do the observations as individuals, without coordinating your work, and each person writes notes, takes photographs or makes sketches as they see fit – as a particular kind of data seems important/necessary in order to ‘capture’ and understand some activity or place (about 1 hour) – Then, organise yourselves as a team to carry out observations in a coordinated fashion by dividing up responsibilities, places and things to participate in/focus on, once again using whatever techniques of recording seem useful (about 1 hours) – Next, have the team try to focus on one place or activity, but now have two members of the team (or three, if 5-member team) only write notes (no sketches or photographs) whilst one member only makes sketches and another only takes photographs (about 1 hour)

From jottings to fieldnotes When writing notes in the field, remember the technique of ‘jottings’ (as discussed in lecture and in the Writing Fieldnotes book by Emerson et al, chapter 2) Include methodological or analytic notes as you find them important, and make sure to document your own activities, circumstances and emotional responses After carrying out the three tasks, spend some time as individuals writing up more detailed accounts, turning your jottings and rough notes into coherent fieldnotes (about 2 hours) Then ‘debrief’ as a team – discussing what you each observed and recorded in your notes (about 1 hour) – Make sure to discuss the differences between jottings and more coherent fieldnotes, and also the differences between taking notes, making sketches, and taking photographs (and the particular value you found with each kind of field data) Finally, be well prepared to describe and discuss all these matters your experiences in the field for the class on Tuesday

Fieldwork exercises: celebrating the magic of the well-known everyday Seeing the world like E.T.: Everything in our world, which seems so well-known for us, is new – strange and magical – for E.T.