As we continue our ethnography we have become a regular part of the environment in our area of study. The employees expect us to be present at our scheduled times and expect us to follow them to their tech calls. For the past week or so calls have been limited to repairs which must be made after classes. Because of this we have spent a lot of time observing leisure life in the tech office. An interesting aspect of the job is that their are constraints on when work can actually be done, so often times there is very little to do other than work on class assignments or socialize with others in the room.
We have not been back on site since Spring Break (we make our visits on Friday's). Spring break was the time that a number of installation projects were to take place, so we are curious to hear the results and see if there are any remaining issues. We have also started to consider the application we would like to develop for our ethnography group for Project 3. Since our study group is already very technologically oriented, they do have a number of custom made software systems in place for their employees to use. We will need to focus on areas that are not already covered by the existing systems, or perhaps focus on improving a particularly frustrating system.
For the most part we have observed the same things as previous weeks, occasionally a friend of an employee or someone from another department will stop by and socialize. But mostly, we see the culture as a place to pass time, socialize and occasionally perform tech duties. It is noteable that almost everyone working in the center has a personal interest in technology and the job is not difficult or challenging to them.
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