INITIATION TO _______. v1

Our project is to initiate a community into something of our choice. My community is an amateur radio society located in the RTP area. In my first attempt I made a poster initiating them to universal signals of distress. After critique yesterday I came away with a lot of great feedback to use in my second attempt.



These are the questions I need to ask myself on my second go around:

How can I make the process more immersive?

How can the signals be instructional/in-depth and make people want to remember/do?

How can I speak "through" the community and not "at" them?

How can I use the visual rhetoric that is dominant on the typography (ie: call signs) to speak more directly to the community?

What fonts, symbols and formats am I choosing that would feel most "authentic"?

I was also surprised to be approached after critique by someone in my class who is a certified amateur radio operator and I got a lot of great feedback from him! I can't wait to see where this one will go in the week to come.

CULTURAL PROBE v2

After careful assessment I still felt like there was merit to my original idea, but wanted to find a way of making it more perceptive. The retrieval of information about the customer’s relationship with Cup A Joe (as a third place) could be more directly approached. I spent a majority of my time figuring out how the probe could be redesigned to motivate action and coming to terms with the fact that while the photos were potentially not giving me the kind of semantic indicators I thought, they could still be used to gain insightful information in other ways.

When a customer walks into Cup A Joe the probe will be visible on the back wall of the smoking room seen through the connecting doorway. It can also can be seen in the window from the street. Since the shop is separated into two rooms, there would be table tents holding photos and prompting people to take action in other areas of the space.


The table tent prototype is purposefully DIY looking to blend in with Cup A Joe's existing collateral.

My aim is to investigate how/why/what is it about Cup A Joe that people self-identify with, so I am prompting them to reflect on their relationship within the space.

Knowing that the next step after taking the photo is a required drawn self portrait makes the participants more conscious of what they take a picture of (they’re thinking “Where in Cup A Joe do I see myself placed?”). This makes the backgrounds of the photos more purposeful than arbitrary. It is hard to make further assumptions about the photo’s assessment because I can’t control the final results. I feel like this cultural probe is setting up an opportunity for the customer to tell me about themselves in relation to the third place. The collection of photos as a whole would offer the most insight, after I’m able to look at the patterns and anomalies of what people are taking a picture of, how they use the photos bottom margin, their tone and verbiage. This kind of probe works well for Cup A Joe because of its relaxing lounge environment, and there is an eclectic customer base who self-identify with the coffee shop (ranging from smokers to non smokers and professors to angst ridden teens). Since the coffee shop uses it’s walls to display local art, this project might come off as an artistic installation.

This probe was designed to motivate participation by speaking to a person’s relational needs: competition, excellence, curiosity and affection. Seeing a collection of rare polaroids on a billboard with the cameras nearby would spark curiosity. Also, a collaborative work that is publicly displayed gives the regulars a chance to be a part of something bigger than themselves, fulfilling their desire to be a part of a community. It is easy to fully engage with the probe since all of the tools are intuitive and user friendly.

After thinking about this project for so long, it felt like getting the information from the participants was too complicated. Finding out what a person wasn't conscious of "saying" through their drawing left me without an accurate assessment of the data. There is definitely still some problem/solution issues to work out with the idea of an effective cultural probe.

CULTURAL PROBE v1

I am happy to start my documentation of grad school, starting with our first assignment:

After writing thick descriptions of a coffee shop, we designed a cultural probe to elicit information about ritual. I approached ritual on a macro scale, and wanted to investigate Cup A Joe coffee house as a "third place" environment, finding out what needs were being fostered there (aside from the obvious brewed beverage).

Ten regulars at Cup A Joe would be given my cultural probe kit, and then instructed to take pictures of places they go to when they're not at home or work. Included would be guidelines that would direct participants to the right kinds of locations. Once the photograph develops, they are asked to immediately draw themselves into the photo. This project would take place over the span of a month, during which time there would be a drop-box located at Cup A Joe. Afterwards, I would meet with them to retrieve the camera and debrief.

An assessment of the conscious and subconscious semiotic indicators from the drawings would give insight into the participant's relationship to third place environments. I felt this would be more effective than if the camera had been turned on the test subjects in all the photographs.

This coming week we will be refining our probes, so I'm curious to see where this can go.