I spent about six hours at The Gulfstream Center for Design on Saturday. I was able to sit down and talk to Samantha and Steve for a bit. They're both "Shop Monitors" which I learned is different than a "Shop Manager." These are the students responsible for watching the model shop and the students working when Mark, the shop manager, is not there. I was also able to interview some students with less shop experience, those enrolled in Introduction to Industrial Design and Model Shop class.

Along with the interviews I did a lot of observing. I sat and watched, trying to find patterns or breakdowns in the system. I tried to record as much information as possible, the number of students in the shop at certain times, the number of desks in use in the bench room, which classes the students are working on, etc. This is where it gets a bit frustrating. It seems that more time I spend researching the shop, the more research I need to do. This project really should be a few quarters long. The first ten weeks spent just observing, seeing when the shop is busy and why it's busy and who's there. I'd like to do a full contextual inquiry, following a student working for a studio class. Finding out when in their design process they use the shop and what for.

I suppose that's the nature of Interaction Design research though. This is where we diverge from the scientific method. We don't work in a vacuum with controlled variables. We need to be quick and agile, twisting and bending our methods of understanding to fit the time and budget constraints. I just wish I would have planned out my research better, focusing on what would produce the most valuable data. I feel as if I've done a lot of preparation and now I'm ready to dig in deep. Perhaps I can continue my research onto this next week. Maybe I should just see what everybody else got in there research. Together we may have something of value.

For now I am going to try to synthesize what I have into a handout and presentation for tomorrow. I'll post links to those when I finish them.