Introduction:

I was fortunate to take the course, Ethnography for Designers with Dr. Michael Lahey at Kennesaw State University (KSU). Through Sam Ladner’s Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector, my team and I learned the theories and concepts of applied ethnography and exercised these concepts throughout the Fall semester of 2022.

Our Field of Study:

Sin-K is a K-pop dance club at KSU. The purpose of the club is to learn, practice, and film K-pop choreographies as well as connect students with an interest in K-pop dances. The club votes on dances, split into subgroups, and practices on the Kennesaw campus Monday through Thursday from 8:30pm to 10:30pm. We noticed the amount of commitment the members input and formed curiosity as to why. To understand the members’ perspective, our team has established a research question: “What influences members to participate in Sin-K?” To give further insight, we have created a cohering metaphor: “Members of Sin-K are black sheep in society, but Sin-K is a home for black sheep.” The purpose of our metaphor is to “... summarize complex ideas and nuanced findings of qualitative research” (Ladner, 146). By doing so, we can focus on the cultural meaning of our study and summarize our findings.

Recruitment:

I was given the opportunity to pitch a study of my choice. As a Korean American, K-pop has always been a part of my life, and dance has been a personal hobby of mine. I am a current member of Sin-K and due to my connections, I pitched Sin-K’s club meetings as a fieldsite to study. Despite my involvement in the club, I was confident that there would be new opportunities for me to practice perspective-taking.

As a class, we voted for our choice of study based on schedules and interest. The fields selected had to gain consent and be accessible to students. Since my pitch was chosen, I naturally became the leader and had the privilege to share this experience with my teammates: Jenny, Eliana, and Yanxing. As team lead, I had the task of gaining consent to access the field. I gave a detailed and transparent explanation of the project to the executive board of Sin-K and received consent fairly quickly.

Analysis:

Within our journals, we were able to analyze in our field notes that helped narrow down our data. As we had individual data, we came together to draw conclusions as a team. I asked the researcher to think about common patterns within their journals so we could make categories. As a team, we made two ordered matrices, one for observations and one for interviews. An ordered matrix is a “conceptually clustered… table that summarizes how participants interacted with or answered questions about the particular product” (Ladner, 151). In our case, it organized our findings of how participants’ actions or statements answered our research question.

• How do Sin-K members engage during the club meetings?
• How do different displays of affection inspire members to continue participation?
• How do relationships formed in Sin-K encourage membership?
• How does Sin-K allow them to express themselves?
• How does their interest in dance influence their participation in Sin-K?

• What made you join Sin-K?
• How does dance influence their decision to participate in Sin-K?
• How do they feel a sense of community within Sin-K?
• How does Sin-K affect their time management in their life?
• How is Sin-K a valuable way to spend their free time?

I wrote each category as a question because it prevented any confusion as to the meaning, and it helped our team find specific data to match. After deciding on the categories, we all found examples of each category and wrote our findings into the table. When that was complete, I noticed that there were many influences. But the most consistent and prevalent is how all these influences created a safe space for the members to freely be themselves. Once we established our answer, we decided to correlate Sin-K members to “black sheep.” I told the other researchers that liking K-pop is a niche. I believe Sin-K is an unrecognized club within KSU and I personally felt like a black sheep outside of the club. But together we share a common interest and that becomes comforting and normal. With our research analysis, answer, and metaphor, we were able to organize our conclusions and begin our report.

Introduction:

For my senior capstone class, we were given the task to design a prototype utilizing Goal-Directed Design (GDD). I pitched the idea of an interactive retail kiosk, because I had the idea of seasonal color analysis as an entertaining feature for brands to incorporate into their shopping experience. From there, we formed teams, and I became the leader for this project.

Meet the Team!

Janice Kim

Cristy Kennedy

Jenny Trejo Romero

Kai Laborde

Eliana Weiss

Modeling:

Our team conducted five user interviews to understand our potential users. Through these interviews, we were able to study behavioral variables such as activites, attitudes, motivations that would provide us depth to creating our personas. We created a visual continuum that helped us visualize the significant patterns between our interviewees. Then, we turned those continuum clusters into characteristics. As a team, we identified their frustrations, feelings, and attitudes, and defined our end goals, life goals, and experience goals. Understanding these helped us create personas that would shape our designs and flow.

Framework:

After our user interviews and personas, we started building our low-fidelity wireframe. It allowed us to create a key path and secondary path that helped us organize the flow of interaction. This allowed us to create validation scenarios to visualize our user goals, behaviors, and needs into our low-fidelity prototype.

The black arrows indicate the key path and the purple arrows indicate the secondary path. By visualizing the screens, we are able to see the flow and any issues user could potentially face. Our team was able to fix the dead ends early on and prevent wasted time on screens that were not needed. The low-fidelity was crucial to solving our challenges of miscommunication. Verbally, I was able to delegate screens and design ideas, but seeing my team members designs, I was able to give refinements and references. As a leader, it gave me the opportunity to keep my team on the same page and uphold the standard.