Crafting ethnographic experiences : ways of knowing Facebook influences of a practice-based approach on research on everyday digital life

This paper presents reflections on ethnographic research, which was undertaken in 2010 exploring the link between Facebook and the use of it by undergraduate students studying in Higher Education at one UK university. The focus of this paper is interrogating the use of practice-based methods within an ethnographic methodology. I present reflections on using design thinking, craft skills and card modeling to supported analyses of participants social interactions on the social media site, Facebook, in coming to know the digital space. Jungnickel and Hjorth (2014, 136) propose that ethnography and practice-based art research have a long ‘tacit history’ and that ‘the process of making and thinking through art is an integral part of doing research’. Using the data collected during the ethnography from my time spent in the field. I take a reflexive view of my translation of the data into material form and discuss the analytical process I went through in coming to know Facebook as ‘narrative interpretation’ and ‘thinking with my hands’

‘I’m always on Facebook!’: exploring Facebook as a mainstream research tool and ethnographic site

This chapter discusses a research project which explored the everyday use of the social network site (SNS) Facebook by first-year undergraduate students in their transition to university. It not only explores the opportunities and challenges of using Facebook as a research site and how this digital approach may differ from a ‘mainstream’ ethnography, but also argues for this approach to be viewed as ‘mainstream’ due to the mediated nature of contemporary social life

CoLAB – Collaborative exhibition as a method to open interior design

The importance of employability in higher education led leaders on an interior design degree to introduce an innovative module that embedded the notions of collaborative working. This paper presents the analysis of three different iterations of the collaborative exhibition module in a post-1992 UK University. The module was designed to provide students with the opportunity to work and engage with their discipline beyond the studio environment. Using data from a digital questionnaire, interviews and the module evaluation, the paper explores the student experiences of the module as a form of independent learning, the challenges they encountered and its relevance to the wider employability agenda. We present these findings under three themes: (1) the importance of employability’; (2) the ‘challenges of collaboration’ and (3) ‘time for reflection and autonomy’. The paper concludes by emphasizing the value of this mode of study for producing deep and autonomous learning

Social intersections. Social media spaces as sites for creative pedagogies.

Social media is pervasive in the lives of both students studying and those working in the creative industries. The mass socialisation of digital and online communications has meant that content is authored, curated, critiqued and reconfigured by a mass of users. Through the collective efforts of the users – posting, liking, commenting and sharing – connection and collaboration takes place. This paper focuses on the hyper-layered nature of social media use by students studying on Design courses at a university in the UK. It explores data across public accessible social media sites – twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, and views them as sites of creative productions. Visual analysis of students’ social media Profiles is presented and compared with those from the creative industries to explore the social intersections of creative production spaces. Social media spaces are sites of creative production, where the two ecosocial systems of trainee and trained converge. The relationship between the trainee designers studying in a university and the trained designers in the external industry is changing. There is a context collapse between creative learning, production and working practices. I present these digital spaces that connect students and creative industries through their hyperlinked ecocsocial environments and explore what this could offer as a creative pedagogic approach

Exploring the Relationship Between a ‘Facebook Group’ and Face-to-Face Interactions in ‘Weak-Tie’ Residential Communities

Using Facebook Groups to connect otherwise anonymous people that live in a single urban development is a relatively new phenomenon. Within residential developments there are a number of common management and performance issues experienced by many isolated inhabitants that are identified through building performance evaluation studies. Facebook is a ubiquitous social network tool and powerful communication platform, particularly popular among young adults. This paper explores the use of Facebook in relation to management and performance issues in two cases of Facebook Group usage within residential communities in the UK. Data was collected through longitudinal digital and physical visits to the residential communities and to the Facebook Group sites. Findings are presented in relation to home learning, site/neighbourhood and self-organising initiatives. We propose that weak-tie residential communities can develop collective efficacy and work together for the overall good of the residential development through communicating on a Facebook Group. This helps to improve the physical environment, facilitating further collective action. There is a clear overlap between social media narrative and the physical experience of daily life, which can help to empower residents

Crafting ethnographic experiences : Ways of knowing Facebook - A practice based exploration of digital spaces - Digital spaces // design thinking // crafting // research methods // social life

This paper presents reflections on ethnographic research, which was undertaken in 2010 exploring the link between Facebook and the use of it by undergraduate students studying in Higher Education at one UK university. The focus of this paper is interrogating the use of practice-based methods within an ethnographic methodology. I present reflections on using design thinking, craft skills and card modeling to supported analyses of participants social interactions on the social media site, Facebook, in coming to know the digital space. Jungnickel and Hjorth (2014, 136) propose that ethnography and practice-based art research have a long ‘tacit history’ and that ‘the process of making and thinking through art is an integral part of doing research’. Using the data collected during the ethnography from my time spent in the field. I take a reflexive view of my translation of the data into material form and discuss the analytical process I went through in coming to know Facebook as ‘narrative interpretation’ and ‘thinking with my hands’

Learning beyond borders : pioneering interdisciplinary learning and teaching approaches to promote socially responsible design practices

Social design is the use of the design process to bring about social change. In this session, staff and students share their experiences of participating in a pioneering interdisciplinary approach to social design at Sheffield Hallam University. Key learning will be highlighted including: how can learning and teaching practices be socially situated, what makes a holistic learning and teaching experience and what happens when learning and teaching moves beyond the classroom to bring transformation to real world issues

Exploring the efficacy of Facebook groups for collective occupant learning about using their homes

The need for quality learning about how to use a home has been an issue gradually emerging from building performance evaluation (BPE) studies carried out in occupied energy efficient homes (Brown & Cole, 2009; Day & Gunderson, 2014). The BPE gap between the internal environment control as intended by designers and the actual inhabitant practices is associated with unpredicted energy consumption and poor indoor air quality (Balvers et al., 2012). The key inhabitant related causes of the ‘performance gap’ are a discrepancy between user needs and design intentions, lack of user understanding and skills to interact with the available controls and insufficient maintenance. These findings indicate that modifying tacit home use practices, adjusting them to new, more technically advanced contexts, is still not sufficiently addressed by the current learning opportunities offered by the professional actors. This paper explores how self-organised closed Facebook Groups set up independently by the residents of two UK case study urban developments have become supportive environments for such learning

CoLAB : Collaborative exhibition as a method to open interior design

The importance of employability in higher education led leaders on an interior design degree to introduce an innovative module that embedded the notions of collaborative working. This paper presents the analysis of three different iterations of the collaborative exhibition module in a post-1992 UK University. The module was designed to provide students with the opportunity to work and engage with their discipline beyond the studio environment. Using data from a digital questionnaire, interviews and the module evaluation, the paper explores the student experiences of the module as a form of independent learning, the challenges they encountered and its relevance to the wider employability agenda. We present these findings under three themes: (1) the importance of employability’; (2) the ‘challenges of collaboration’ and (3) ‘time for reflection and autonomy’. The paper concludes by emphasizing the value of this mode of study for producing deep and autonomous learning

Thinking about the more than human in making and research process.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the role of making and embodied thinking in processes of engaging with research data, findings and ideas. As researchers, we are inseperable from the world (Harraway, 2016), in which humans and things “slip-slide into each other” (Bennet, 2010, p.4). Thus, the more-than-human material world, and the materiality of our human bodies, is always part of the research processes. Ingold (2013) describes processes of ‘making to think’ or ‘designerly making’ (69), in which human cognition is never fully or entirely in control. Instead, the maker’s imagination must hurry to keep up with the materials, in a process forever poised between “catching dreams and coaxing materials” (73). This workshop will explore processes of making and thinking, by employing intra action with simple materials, including paper, scissors, lego and playdoh, in order to explore research data. The workshop will begin with the presentation of two research projects. In the first a closed Facebook Group and a new build residential apartment block are the sites of the research. I present explorations of home learning activities which were enacted across the sites with a focus on more-than-human flows between the digital and physical spaces and places. I will share images from the Facebook Group and some models I have made with the digital data. In the second, young children played and explored during a series of ‘forest schools’ session as a nursery. In particular, I focus on the children’s rolling down a small hill in the nursery grounds, thinking about how these actions came to feel so significant and place-shaping within the research. I will share in particular video data from a series of different episodes of hill rolling, and offer as a provocation ideas about the role of bodily experience, place, materiality of the hill and intra action in making sense of these episodes. In the second part of the workshop, participants will be invited to explore the emergent ideas we have presented, by making to think. Choosing from paper, lego or playdoh, participants will work the materials with their bodies, at the same time as discussing the ideas presented, whilst still images and video data are played on loop throughout the making session. To conclude the session we ask the participants to give us feedback on the experience of exploring data but not having been there for the original fieldwork. Drawing on Haraway’s (2016) concept of speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) we end the session by reflecting with our material creations through storytelling. To explore how these different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives might come into dialogue and enable us to think in new ways about research, making and design processes as never a soley human endeavour