Appendix > Case Study 1 > Video as Data Colleccting Device
Case Study: The General Meade Society of Philadelphia
From December 2008 to May of 2009, I documented the General Meade Society of Philadelphia- a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and preserve the memory of General Meade. Through film and photography, my documentation included a variety of events from an educational symposium to a reenacting in a Civil War battle.
Part One: Video as Data Collecting Device
At the Society’s January meeting, I asked members of the Meade Society if they were interested in creating an “alternative” portrait. Unable to define alternative portraiture in an understandable way for my audience or to myself, I then proposed the making of a documentary film with the Society. The framing of the project from portraiture to documentary changed the expectations of the project as well as a lens for my participants to view their role in it. As a seemingly familiar language, this understanding can be viewed in how members of the Society addressed the camera. On the other hand, this moved my role as embedded designer from a person taking notes in the background to active participant.
There is precedent for the use of video as a tool for design research. In their book Designing with Video, Salu Yliriksu and Jacob Buur employ the use of video as a way to focus the user-centered design process. On the hand, Rachael Strickland draws on the history of observational cinema as a way for “discerning relationships among phenomena and imparting structures to experience, for dwelling the alternating currents of ambiguity, for making sense through association, combinatorial play and projective construction” (119).
Working from Sanders’ map, my approach is similar with Yliriksu and Burr as well as Strickland in that there are elements of both applied ethnography and generative design in our techniques. What distinguishes my approach, however, is the translation of this video across a variety of media types. For example, only through the editing process did I realize that a documentary film was not the best approach to tell the story. Nor was the variety of media types that attempt to translate my analysis of the video to including an Exhibition, poster or interactive presentation.