Task 8: Reflection on project work

Last words on field research project!

In general the project was a success! not because everything went smoothly or it generated valuable data! Actually it had its dose of confusion and frustration, but because we got to try field work, and to find out its good and difficult aspects in practice. I can see that how much of problem it could cause if I would start doing such work for the first time within a design project(with "no idea" state that i had when i started this course!).

Looking back to the initial project plan, there are changes: some because the original proposal was naively planned and some other because we failed to fully conduct it.
First thing that we did different was the part that we suggested to fit the data into a theory of group work or activity theory. After some consulting sessions we found out that this may not be part of field work but more analysing step. It was our decision to skip this step.
Second thing that went different from plan was that we wanted to interview all the stakeholders but we could not. This was mainly our fault and because of poor planing/time estimation. we left this part for last weeks and then it was during exam time which we could not find students who had free time for interviews.

I think next time I go for ethnographic study, I will study the problem beforehand. Reading related documents, and all the related material that I can find out of the field itself. like in case of our project's context, I would look into university websites, tools, regulations and available documents.
Next thing I will do differently is that I will try to formulate a research question or hypothesis for myself! It can help to have some initial hypothesises to start with. and based on a set of initial hypothesises I will direct the field work in more defined way.

Personal take aways:
-Read the books written about the task, before starting doing things! somebody already done these things!
-Planning is important: somethings can't be repeated, some tasks may take longer than thought.
-Organising and sorting gathered data, and analysing them on time is very useful: I can't imagine writing the final paper without affinity notes and task sequence and interpretation notes that we had for each subject. you think that you wont forget anything, but after some weeks I could not remember most of the details. and I had no time and interest to listen to endless interview recordings afterwards!