<aside> 🎧 Simeon My background is in all things music and audio! I’m here to offer my perspectives on creativity, branding, and perceived authenticity, as well as learn anything and everything for our group!
Observation + Development
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email: [email protected]
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<aside> 🕉️ *Shikhar Design researcher, Urban Scavenger, Flâneur by heart (see my findings here), and love exploring tools, let’s get some chai sometime !! for more - www.sgraphs.com
I am a master’s design student, and my motivation to join the program is to diversify my projects and connections, add another project to my portfolio, and travel to Marseille for free !!*
UX/UI + Development
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<aside> 🔲 Dee Filmmaker, researcher, writer
I’ve been studying social software/networks/graphs/media for many years and am interested in whether and how we might rescue many-to-many communications technologies from the attention economy.
****Observation
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<aside> 👁️🗨️ We are Team Spirit, with a focus on exploring the sacred experiences in technology and improvised spiritual spaces, with a possible angle towards social networks. We shall see!
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<aside> 📅 Program phases: RESEARCH [17.04~16.05] IDEATION [17.05~29.06] DEVELOPMENT [30.06~26.07]
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<aside> 👁️ **Observation Track
Getting in, hanging out - with Justin Pickard**
READING: Access: Reflections on Studying up in Hollywood - Ortner
As a filmmaker, this about gaining access to a “community” I am notionally a part of and trying to gain access to myself, but in a different way for a different reason. The open and public ways of interfacing with closed communities are instructive, partly because I know how these “opportunities” operate as part of the way the community keeps itself closed: nominal openness is an alibi for keeping people out deliberately.
Good That You Are One of Us - Mwangi
The world of Kenya’s flower industry is the subject of this article that explores identity and how multiple identities overlap. The author’s linguistic, tribal, national, and class identities each have a role in getting her access, in gaining trust, in establishing credentials. What a read.
LECTURE:
We discussed the ways that we are our ourselves our observation tools, including our backgrounds, languages, communities, and connections.
TEAM DISCUSSION:
We see that one of the strengths of our team is our diversity - in terms of age, nationality, languages, location, religion, and interests, we cover a huge amount of ground and potentially have access to a multiplicity of communities.
An early preoccupation of the team is to look at religious or spiritual communities. Simeon’s faith might give us access to closed communities in a way Shikhar and I might struggle to.
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<aside> 👁️ **Observation Track
Showing your workings - with Justin Pickard**
We learnt about the types of field notes professional observers can take and started thinking about how we, as observers, might keep track of our observations.
Jottings and scratch notes: these can be a prelude to field notes, what you can jot down without breaking the flow of observation. Notes of actions of fragments of speech, with time, date and place recorded. Learning about this as a deliberate practice that can be used as the base of later notes was revelatory to me. The recording of impressions to aid memory for the writing up of more complete notes later.
Headnotes: The notes you keep in your head.
<aside> 🚨 These strike me as too dangerous to be relied upon for anything but the shortest time.
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<aside> 👁️ **Observation Track
Observational Practice - with Justin Pickard**
In this lecture we were introduced to Design and Visual Methods of observational research - how you can create something, either a tangible object or a visual artefact, and introduce it to your community. Their responses can teach you a lot, both about what you have created and the community you are observing.
We talked about Patchwork Ethnography, an approach to observation and designing research that focuses on what counts for the community you are observing and the reason for your research.
Go-alongs can be useful when observing individuals as they live their ordinary lives doing things that are ordinary and unremarkable to them. This sounds a powerful form of observation, but not immediately useful to us as we look at Christian worship communities.
We are now in the process of trying to pick a community to focus our observations on and choose the right observation methods. Our early conversations around this as a team suggest maybe looking at young, urban Christians. This is a network that Simeon is part of and so our access should be fairly straightforward. We need to remain conscious of bias due to his familiarity (and my [Dee] lack thereof).
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<aside> 👁️ **Observation Track
Getting it right - with Justin Pickard**
Session 5 was about Disclosure - how should we represent ourselves to groups we are seeking to observe.
Who is the audience for our observations?
How does consent work in terms of community agreement? What is the scope for opting out? What if an individual wants to opt out when their “community” has opted in?
A refusal to be observed is not a negative. It too can be observed and can be informative in itself, depending on how and why (if we know).
Commitment - what and who are we committed to in this process?
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<aside> 🤹 Weekly Review: Community Discussion - WEEK 4 - 9th May
What is our Research Question? (not yet clear)
We are currently looking at young, urban Christians in communities in flux.
Need to interrogate:
How far could digitalisation of religious life go? - Nadia This feels like it’s going to be a central question in our research.
AI & religious - do things we don’t know or understand become more abstract, more spiritual? Where does the arcane fit into this project, if at all? (an open question for now)
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<aside> 👁️ Observation Track - Troubleshooting 1
We are narrowing down to observing the HBD network of evangelical churches. They have a policy of planting new churches from older ones. It is a rapidly expanding network of churches and that is part of a deliberate strategy of expansion.
TBNUK is a closed private social network for Christians that we are hoping to get access to through Simeon’s contacts. He used to work at Trinity Broadcast Network.
Justin observed that this is a moment of disruptive technologies that might be affecting people’s religious and collective worship practices.
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<aside> 🔍 Community Observation
We are going to start our observations with the HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) network of churches. We’re interested in how they have a deliberate and explicit strategy for expanding and opening new churches. As such, there are always new churches being established, which means for that part of the network there is a state of flux.
London is the most religious part of the UK (other than Northern Ireland) due to changing demographics. Recent Christian immigrants from Africa have established new churches and swelled the numbers in existing churches.
Simeon has done work on the streaming of church services. This became more popular during Covid. Many churches still livestream their services to tiny online audiences.
As our observational anchor, with the best access to the network, Simeon will be doing a lot of the in person observations and interviews. We will need to be conscious of his positionality and analyse his observations with outsider perspectives from me and Shikhar.
Fixed points in research questions:
We are going to study Christian populations and changing demographics. We are also going to look at sacredness in digital spaces.
Research Q - How can we make digital experiences authentic/spiritual?
Two areas of observation:
****An article Shikhar and I both read that is extremely relevant to our thinking at the moment: Religions | Special Issue : Sacred Spaces: Designing for the Transcendental (mdpi.com)
We might look at the manipulation of light intensity in virtual churches/sacred spaces. What does light mean in a space that is entirely made of light?
Should we build a sacred space in a game engine and do test walkthroughs?
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<aside> 👁️ Observation Track Mentoring - with Justin Pickard
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<aside> 👁️ Observation notes - Refugee Church Service in Dunstable, UK
9th June 2023 When we were investigating the workings of improvised spiritual spaces, I gained the opportunity to visit a church service for local refugees that runs inside the hotel where they’re living. This was the Holiday Inn Express in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, UK.
The service was held in a small conference room, with children’s toys piled up at the back and sides of the room, led by the local church and some American students from Oral Roberts University (a Christian school) who had come to stay with the church for a few weeks. The church had brought a full PA setup, instruments, tea/coffee/chocolate bars and printouts of the lyrics of the songs they were planning to sing in the service. Unfortunately, one of the refugees Jorge, who acts as a community leader for the Christian refugees in the hotel, wasn’t there for the service. Usually, he translates the lyrics for the printouts into Spanish (the language most commonly spoken by the community), as well as real-time translating what’s said in the service.
During the service, I had a good position to observe, participate and take notes, by sitting on the back row of chairs on the end next to a table that I could lean on to write. I sat next to a young South American couple called Hector and Joy; they didn’t speak any English. I managed to ask them a few basic questions using Google Translate into Spanish: their names, where they’re from, how often had they been to the service etc. At the end of the service, I was able to have serval casual conversations/interviews with both refugees and people from the local church who had come to help. Finally, as I was leaving, I was able to ask the head of security a few questions about the structure of operations and the challenges he faces during the job.
Key Insights:
Future Interactions:
Once we had developed our final focus for the project (creating a network of connected objects to support prayer relationships), we ultimately decided that we shouldn’t continue our working relationship with this specific community. This is because we had to listen to our moral guts telling us that it didn’t feel appropriate to go back to them, asking for their opinions on interconnected recycled tech for spiritual relationships when they have so many other pressing and physical needs. It felt like we would be using them for the project.
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