Structured Observation + Data Visualisation

For this week's task, we were split into groups in which I got put into a group with Mirin, Winnie as well as Yuan Shang. We were assigned the student lounge area for observation where we split up into two to make things easier. Mirin and I stayed at the second floor where as Winne and Yuan Shang went downstairs. Before splitting up, we decided that we would look at how many girls, and boys are in the area at five minute intervals (though I did them at 10 minute intervals 😅). Besides gender, we looked at what kind of things they were doing. Whether it was eating, or doing work we made sure to make a tally chart.

observation tally

At first I looked at four categories (besides gender) by the first time check which were: sleeping/resting, people using their phones, eating and lastly listening to music. As it was only around 9:50 am there were not that many people in there where five out of twelve of them were either asleep or resting. The rest were on their phones, listening to music or eating.

the room when we first entered

10:15 - 10:40 roughly stayed like this (some people were in the corner on the left)

the hanging chairs remained full from the beginning til the end as people wanted to sleep in them

Once it hit 10:00 am - 10:15 am more people started to come in. From twelve students, it quickly became nineteen - seventeen in total. There were two friend groups in total. One of them consisted of two boys and two girls and the other was a group of four girls. Both of these groups were doing their assignments while chit chatting and were there till Mirin and I had left the room. Additionally, the hanging chairs seemed to be the hit of the room as whenever a person would leave, another would quickly take their place.

sorry for the ugly photo...wasnt tall enough to get a good shot

When we got to class, all four of us discussed our findings and decide to focus on location, time along with category from the L.A.T.C.H method. After brainstorming ideas, we opted to go for a combination of a double (?) bar chart that goes both up and down as well as a pie chart at the end of each bar. The top half of the chart represents the second floor of the block where as the bottom half, represents the first level. Each bar indicate the amount of people at the time and the pie chart shows how many students were boy/girls. As you can see, most people were downstairs compared to the second floor.

At first we wanted to do essentially the same thing but instead have separate bars for both boys and girls and as for the pie chart we wanted to show what they were doing at the time. We then came to the conclusion that it would take too long to finish due to the time period we had. Therefore to keep it simple we focused on the genders.

I think this was my first time observing people and found pretty interesting though a bit awkward. It was a bit hard to not make it obvious when looking around to see what people were doing as there were not many people in the room compared to the cafeteria and foyer. Some people were facing me and there was a girl who was sitting right beside me who made me a little self conscious as she would sometimes look to the side and see me with a bunch of tally marks on my notebook. Working with the others was really great as I have never worked with Winnie and Yuan Shang before. They seemed a little shy at first but are really cooperative to work with.