Participant Activities - sensorial heightening/ restriction

Headphone image source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OAnjrFxpJMg/R7W91_jfPVI/AAAAAAAACrE/rLm5nl-OYhU/s1600-h/headphones_earmuffs.jpg

Participant comment card - draft idea

Notes on Participant Activities - Filming & Editing

Some ideas and notes around possibilities for participant activities and how we could conduct the outings ...

Filming & Editing
- Intimate 'over-shoulder' filming
- Recording person's 'eyes' - 'Participant eye view'
- Key words spoken/ recorded can be highlighted during editing, or on map - eg. comfortable, free, relaxed, busy, stressful ...
(after speaking with Johanna)

Participant Test Outing 01

We conducted the participant test outing in London's West-End/ Soho area, giving the participant a map of the area and highlighting 5 key spaces she had to find her way to from the starting point at Cambridge Circus.

We also gave her a camera, a very basic pen-voice-recorder and a notepad.

The key spaces were:
Denmark Street (commercial)
Tottenham Court Road Station, South-West exit (transport interchange)
Soho Square (residential and green)
Frith Street (residential and commercial)

We quickly noticed that to manage the route with the mapa, the camera, the voice-pen and take notes was asking too much, so we walked with the participant and asked questions and took notes ourselves while she was feeding back.

It was hard to get her to focus on small scale details, but as she got the idea of the sorts of questions we were asking, about why she felt how she felt about the different spaces, she started to give more specific feedback.

We need to develop some very specific questions and tasks to get the participants to feed-back observations that will be most informative for this project.

At the end of the oouting, we sat in a cafe and the participant drew a map of where she'd been, without looking at the one we'd given her. She then noted comments on the map about her impressions, also noting a score of between 1(low) and 10(high) for her overall impressions of each of the sites she observed; ie are they positive or negative, 'Do' or 'Don't' spaces.

A scan is posted above.

Here is a scan of the second half of the visit notes...

Participant Test Outing 01

Participant Test Outing 01

Participant-User-Categories

• Tourists: little knowledge of a space, different cultural codes.
• Night-time users (shift-workers, revellers): knowledge of a space in time-based context.
• Commuters: limited knowledge of non-transport spaces that form transient parts of their journey.
• Residents / walkers: in-depth knowledge of a space and social make-up