presentation on territoriality for environmental psychology
DESCRIPTION
This is a demonstration of my love for thinking, for creating experiences, for living out of the box, and how that often means getting down & dirty with an array of skills including coding to say the least. Long story short instead of conducting research like we were told and left to do I lost several weeks of sleep to make a web-based system for entering and visualizing data over time. The ad-hoc system I developed became the focus of the research and in the end even the professor started thinking like a developer, "It's a shame this isn't on a mobile device!" (I didn't have any at the time.) --- To draw conclusions one needs to have solid data. But you don't want to stop at conclusions, you want to be able to keep going. Having a flexible, easy-to-use GUI for punching data in can open countless doors for inquiry. The base conclusions you were thinking to land at would barely even be the beginning if your data is not just solid, but can be brought to life varying in visualization in at least as much as you care to ask. This was our final presentation for PS3324: Environmental Psychology, Polytechnic Institute of NYU in the fall of 2008. The initial project was to gauge stress of commuters, but that wasn't happening. We chose to study territoriality in the University cafeteria and lounge. As we started conducting our research it hit us not only did we not know what we were looking for, our data was too volatile for figuring anything out. I took it upon myself to make a drag-and-drop, web-based interface for recording and retrieving data. Students could be colored and shaped to describe ethnicity and gender. While developing and using the GUI we realized the environment itself is also dynamic and could offer more to say about groupings and territoriality. So we added environmental attributes such as chairs and tables all scaled according to the given template. Undertaking developing a GUI, a usable system for punching in and visualizing data, was in and of itself an immensely rewarding and revealing experience. It completely transforms the entire nature of whatever one is researching and can bring so much to life.TRANSCRIPT
Commuter Stress
by Abed Islam & Carlos LimaNot really.
by Abed Islam & Carlos Lima
Come to Poly at 8 in the morning.-That commute is way too stressful, can we do something else? Please? Help?
Towards Territoriality
Learning to look for territoriality in Polyby Abed Islam & Carlos Lima
Mission
•Proposed project on territoriality
•Go make observations in the Cafeteria and Regna Lounge
•Look for signs of grouping, e.g. Athletic teams via jerseys
Initial MethodRound 1
“We’re looking for…”•Go to each destination:
•Sit down and record the general location of people, their cumulative activity, their gender via pencil & paper
•Make note of grouping, i.e. obvious student organization affiliation
•Next slide is first sample of cafeteria
Gathering data
Initial MethodRound 2
“What’re we looking for?”•Go to each destination:
•Sit down and record the general location of people, their cumulative activity, their gender via pencil & paper
•Where are the groups?
•Let’s be a little more accurate.
Cafeteria
•Realized:
•Didn’t know what to look for
•Scenes constantly change over time. Problem trying to record placement, people and activities by hand (takes apx. 20 minutes)
•Didn’t find immediate signs of grouping with limited data
•Data too limited? Perhaps doing something wrong or not well enough...
Hypotheses
•The Observers and their recordings are just as vital as the data being compiled.
•Just as vital as presentation of data
•Placing emphasis on presentation aspect of data to gain insight into what was unseen
Method“What are[n’t] we looking
at?”• Pictures
• Take pictures of the scene and interpret this data once system is in place
• Less human error. Photos are time-stamped, actions locked in time
• Can identify people and behaviors across sets of data
• Entry and retrieval of all information to be done visually (GUI) against a database
• Helps us realize the value of what’s missing and what’s present
• Can look at specific criteria (behaviors, people etc.)
Cafeteria
A Day in the Life: Typical cafeteria usage. Date: 11/18/08 4:50PM
Cafeteria
A Day in the Life: Typical cafeteria usage. Date: 11/18/08 5:00PM
Cafeteria
Cafeteria
Layout of gathered information. But wait. There’s more:
Lounge
Lounge usage. Date: 11/18/08 5:10PM
Lounge
Lounge usage. Date: 11/18/08 5:10PM
Lounge
Lounge usage. Date: 11/18/08 5:10PM
Observations
• Angle
• Orientation of furniture/people wouldn't normally be recorded while in the environment.
• A visible angle might create the assumption that they are engaging with a person adjacent or across from them.
• Furniture (and to an extent people), perpendicular/parallel to walls
Observations•Furniture
•The types and availability of furniture differ from location to location.
•Some people might like that the same things are in the same place, the consistency is safe, a stress-free no-brainer choice.
Observations
•Furniture
•Movable: People can adapt to the situation
•Group-based/-inclined
•Large groups can divide/come together
Observations•Placement
•Distance of “loners”: similar but modifiable depending on the circumstances
•Migration from pencil data to size-accurate reveals the positioning of earlier data might be arbitrary to the point of uselessness
•Mathematical? Dependent on crowding?
Demo•No differentiation between
student/teacher.
•Does this matter?
•If it this area were a classroom and not the lounge our angles and positions would indicate that Abed and Carlos were probably teaching the class at this time, or plotting to overthrow the professor (had we left him unnamed) or might just be presenting.
And in the end...
• The system is incomplete:
• Didn’t create relations between people
• Didn’t create relations to pictures taken or have a system of viewpoints and timings
• The system can grow:
• Show things over time either via animations or actual video, more depth of data
• The notion of mathematical formula providing insight into the unseen is not alien, having more data readily available might help such a thing “occur” to someone who is equipped to arise to such a task
• Immersion in the environment makes a fundamental difference:
• In the demo the professor became a student
• In practice as observers we are often too close to our environment to look for new things, presentation helps take the observer away but it doesn’t give us an independent view
And in the end...• Distraction/digression
• Presentation-emphatic method may end up making us ask too many questions though while useful may be irrelevant, e.g. perpendicular furniture
• But is this “junk” data/inquiry really junk or part of a bigger picture?
• Presentation from entry to ‘graph’ significantly influenced perspective
• We immediately went from a pseudo-deterministic view to something objective
• With more data and precision we may see a relation between groups by activity, ethnicity and the density of a public space and its available furniture