Reflection in action is
experiencing, thinking on your feet, thinking about what to do next and acting
straight away. Reflection on action is thinking about something that has
happened, thinking what you would do differently next time and taking your
time. (http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=2732&chapterid=1113)
We conducted our first set of experiments today. We arranged
to meet at uni at 9 to get started setting up all the equipment. We knew it
would be a lengthy process installing, linking and organising all the technical
equipment. This turned out to be relatively straight forward as Carlos was a
great help. We had to re-format the MP3 players after unsuccessfully trying to
load the new sounds and delete the previous test sounds. (As delightful as Spanish
guitar is, it would have ruin the mood of our pleasant and unpleasant sounds.)
We were able to easily sync our phones to the Go Pro cameras. All of the MP3
players were fine until the first participant entered the unit, when one of
them stopped working. We decided as a group to proceed with 5 sounds as it
would still get the desired effect. After the first two participants, we
realised that something as subtle as the way we had placed the paint in the
unit was subconsciously influencing the colour choices the participants were
making. We had green and yellow together on the left hand side and red and blue
together on the right. Each participant chose the colours based on the side
they were positioned (e.g green and yellow for participant one, and blue and
red for participant two) In order to make sure that we were not influencing the
colours choices we moved the paint so all the colours were together. It seemed
like a small change but it did effect the choices made after that.
We struggled to get participants initially and under
estimated the amount of time it would take for each participant to complete the
experiment. We were able to organize a process to minimize waiting time, by
getting individuals to fill out the consent form and read the instructions
whilst another participant was inside the pod. Perhaps if we had arranged a
quicker experiment then more people would have taken part. Also the fact that
participants were asked to stand in wet paint definitely put a number of people
off. It could be argued that our instructions were not clear enough, some of
the participants had to ask repeatedly what they were expected to do. The
difficulty is to not over control the output of individual participants whilst
maintaining a comparable element for the purposes of correlation and quantitative
data. For instances, one of the participants used all 4 colours, whilst another
only completed the ‘pleasant’ sound tests.
Unfortunately there was not a lot of space for individuals
to wait, and the longer the waited the more of the sounds they could hear. It
is difficult to know at this stage whether the participants could anticipate
the sounds from outside the unit and in turn whether this effected their
movements, colour selections or sound choices.
After the first 4 tests, we only had male participants. We had
not considered previously that we would have a bias in any particular gender or
age group. (Perhaps mainly 18-29 year olds based on the average age of university
students.) A group decision was made to continue to let anyone participate,
instead of making a conscious effort to select specific ages and genders. This
would then become an interesting unexpected finding within our data.
The paint consistency was a success, although a little
slippery initially, and participants were able to easily refill their footwear
throughout the experiment. The paper sheets worked well, although the size was
not quite right, however we were unable to save any of the large sheets as
samples because they were too wet and awkward to manoeuvre in and out of the
unit. We were, however able to capture a shot of the final test sheets using
the Go Pro cameras. The downside was that the effort put in to constructing the
large sheets of paper seemed a waste with how quickly they were disposed of.
After completing 12 tests we had to stop because all of the
cameras ran out of battery at the same time. We were also completely exhausted
from actively gathering participants, organising people, capturing data,
filming, interviewing and photographing. Although we only had 12 participants,
we were able to successfully record 3 interviews, covered a range of ages,
including two under 18’s, which gave great results and amass a wealth of
footage. We also received positive interest from passers by and nice comments
from participants. I was surprised by the level of interest from individual
participants. They wanted to know more about the ideas behind the installation,
any information about the publication and were keen to ask questions about our
individual practice. Overall it was a success.
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