Workshop action shots!

Homework assignment for Mar. 20:

This assignment should take you approximately 75-90 minutes to complete. There are no required readings for Thursday’s class.

You’ve been hired by the Free Speech Movement Cafe to make recommendations for improving customer service. The cafe owners know they get some things right, but they’re looking for opportunities to be smarter, exceed customer expectations, and serve the campus community even better in ways they haven’t yet imagined.

To do before class:

• Spend at least 45 minutes at the FSM Cafe focused on researching this question.
• Employ covert observation, interviewing, and/or any other applicable method you’ve learned in this class to capture as much data as you can during this limited window of time. Because this will be a short field visit, you can relax some of the formalities — e.g., if you interview someone, there’s no requirement to prepare a protocol in advance, record the conversation, or transcribe the verbatim conversation after the interview — just take quick notes about what you learn. (Remember to separate fact from interpretation in your notes.)
• You may use a notebook, your laptop, a tablet, and/or your phone to capture relevant data points — sketches, written notes, photos, and audio. If there are artifacts worth collecting for this purpose, feel free to do so. Try to capture at least 20 discrete and relevant data points during your visit.
• You may visit the cafe alone or with a small group, but work individually while performing this research. No collaboration, no sharing of notes, no discussing the research during or afterward.
• IMPORTANT: Spend no time or energy on crafting recommendations just yet — that will come later. For now, focus purely on data collection.

How to prepare your data before class (“make the data visual and physical”):

• Make print-outs of meaningful photos you took during your field visit. (No need to print meaningless or redundant photos.)
• If you made sketches that can’t be torn from a paper notebook, replicate them as a paper print-out.
• If you took handwritten notes, bring them to class for reference. No need to type or transcribe, but be sure you can read them (clarify any illegible words), and take a moment to use a highlighter pen to call out especially interesting points.
• If you typed notes into a laptop or device, highlight the especially interesting points with a different color or formatting. Bring either your laptop/device or a printed version of your notes to class for reference.
• If you captured audio, make a quick list that describes each clip you feel illustrates an interesting point.