Mini-Fieldwork: Observation & Fieldnotes

Repeatable (you can return three times), populated (recurring human interaction), and ethically low-risk (no children as focus, no medical/legal settings, no private homes, no covert recording).

Three sessions of 20–30 minutes each, ideally at three different times of day/week in one public setting.

Keywords, fragments, direct quotes, times, and sketches jotted in the field — not prose — roughly one line every minute or two.

Because space is data: entrances, seating, sightlines, and 'hot' vs. 'dead' zones reveal social structure.

Within 24 hours (60–90 minutes of writing) — notes not written up within a day are half lost.

Observation, Inference, Analytic Memo, and Personal/Reflexive.

Observation is concrete and timestamped ('she exhaled audibly, folded arms, looked at the clock twice'); inference is your interpretation ('she was annoyed'), which must be flagged as a guess.

Emerging patterns and themes, questions for the next session, and links to course concepts.

Your own feelings, visibility, and positionality — e.g., feeling conspicuous with a notebook, or reading 'efficiency' where regulars read 'comfort'.

Laundromat regulars claim 'their' machines with nothing marking the claim; it is enforced by habit and gaze rather than signs.