Research Diary - Walking and Texting

For my research diary I recorded five people walking down a street whilst texting a small paragraph into a hand held device. The idea behind this experience is that your senses are effected by the experience of having to rely on your peripheral vision to guide you as you walk. Here in lies many sensory experiences that go unnoticed, and when interviewed about their experiences participants said that once they had to think about their senses and analyze them was when they realized how intricate and complex their sense of vision
was when obscured.

This image is part of a collective group of artwork related to the study of peripheral vision, the idea was that you can recognize scenes and objects more clearly using peripherals then focused vision.

The process of walking a texting is the catalyst for the experience. It is hard to study the peripheral vision if you do not make it apparent, peripheral vision goes unnoticed so often because it is a natural process for the eye.

Recording the experience was a difficult task. It is hard to directly engage with another persons sight, and for this reason observing sight is a difficult process. To get over this hurdle is instead asked participants to tell me their experiences in words. I interviewed the participants both when they were walking and texting and after they completed the task. This was the way I collected my data. I repeated the process three times so that the participants could get an understanding both of their own sense and also how to answer the question. When asked generic questions about their experience I let them answer how ever they wanted in hopes of getting an honest and natural collection of data.

The diary itself is self explanatory and to the point. The results could be averaged out into five main experiences that went unnoticed. The fact that everyone could relate to the same experiences made the research accurate.

Some images were taken by the participants of their experience i.e. their field of view while walking and texting. Because a camera cannot illustrate the way a human eye sees an image recording research with video or camera becomes relatively unimportant, the real research and experience was within the verbalization of the experience, the interviews, the personal reactions and realizations of the participants when they have to verbalize a new experience. I felt that for my research this was the best method of collecting data.

However, I will include some images that the participants took while they were walking and texting:

 As you can see from the pictures they are not nearly as expressive of the experience as a verbal recollection.  But nonetheless it is important to see some pictures of the research to perhaps see what the participants saw, even if it does not communicate the experience as well as words.

Videos of the experience were recorded as well but were not nearly as expressive or accurate as an interview of the experience.