Do Fest Experiment #8: Detectorist lanyards
It wouldn’t be Do Fest Dudley without an invitation to the super-curious to be festival detectorists. This means being invited to notice, collect and reflect on all kinds of data generated by Do Fest experiments. This could be anything from a feeling you have while taking part in some doing, to observations of how people on the street interact with whatever has popped up; art, a parklet, or some pom pom making.
At Do Fest in 2017 our detectorists were given a short briefing, a handy list of top tips, a journal to record data and observations in, and a badge! This year people were going to be outside, so there was a practical consideration around the tools that would help people pay attention and document observations and reflections; we felt paper journals wouldn’t work so well if it was windy or rainy.
We also had some learning from Detectorism Scrapbooks we gave to detectorists in 2018 that people love them and keep them, but feel they are too beautiful to write in. So we needed something that was both practical for the conditions and context it would be used in, and less like something to treasure than the scrapbooks are.
We decided to experiment with a riff on the traditional festival lanyard which would have a programme on it, making a detectorist lanyard. This would be a very visible and creative tool. For detectorists it would generate feelings around what it means to take part and belong to a happening. The lanyard would also stress the interaction between learning and doing, taking part and reflecting.
Prototyping
In true experimental approach, Jo Orchard-Webb created a very lo-fi prototype, and put it in people’s hands at a Gather & Create dinner before Do Fest.
Jo wanted people to touch it and observe them as they moved through the pages and read the questions. She wanted to watch them using it to see if it was an easy and intuitive thing to use as a learning and observation tool.
She has shared that what she saw when members of CoLab Dudley’s Collective held and explored what was in the lanyard included:
- excitement
- curiosity
- and a sense of relief that learning could be done in such a different way to say a survey, or other traditional methods.
It was apparent that the detectorism lanyard aligned with the values of creatives and doers, and they had helpful suggestions on ways to improve it. These included the order of the questions, the size of the font, having blank pages for extra notes or doodles, and the manner in which the lanyard pages would be held together so that it was functional and easy to move between pages which wouldn’t be used sequentially.
Jo worked with Vanessa Randle to create the lanyards so that they would be recognisably part of a family of tools, alongside the scrapbooks.
The prompts in the lanyard are very intentional.
The top tips are about a practice of paying attention and looking for patterns. This is just one way in which we ensure that our research methods becomes interventions in themselves because we’re encouraging curiosity, observation and seeing in new ways.
The prompt to reflect on around what is sensed (seeing, doing, hearing, feeling) reinforces that practice. Specific questions relate to CoLab Dudley / Do Fest goals and principles around:
- Places and spaces
- Connections (relationships)
- Curiosity and experimenting
Further testing
Testing of the designed lanyards took place during Paint Dudley’s Exhibition in a Day. Eight doers readily became Paint Dudley detectorists. Some wanted to complete the lanyards there and then, others wanted to take them home and bring them back later. Some people used them to sit and reflect after the activity or happening, for others they were a catalyst for conversation over coffee, with people asking each other the questions. The use of them varied dramatically from single word responses, to detailed notes, to illustrations. Jo analysed what people had shared, and we agreed we didn’t need any changes to the design. All of this detectorism was captured and drawn on to feedback to the Arts Council in relation to Paint Dudley.
Do Fest Detectorism
Over the three days of Do Fest eight people responded to the invitation to be festival detectorists, a mix of local doers, Fellow Travellers and Do Fest Friends. This detectorism took place alongside participant observation undertaken by Jo, and and detectorism journals completed by three other CoLab Dudley team members.
The intimacy of the reflections by the festival detectorists was striking. The gentle and quite playful provocations in the lanyards led to much more personal and deeper reflections than a more formal or traditional way of capturing learning might have done.
Some Detectorists really welcomed the spaces that the lanyard had to write and draw on. Others preferred to write more freely in their own notepads, using the lanyard questions as prompts. The prompts helped with intentionally paying attention and encouraging people to look for patterns. Usually we just write what happens, we don’t look for what Gregory Bateson would frame as the pattern that connects.
What we noticed, what we’d change
The detectorism lanyards opened up an opportunity for conversations about CoLab Dudley and how we learn and do together. They act like a personal diary, and also a physical reminder that detectorists are part of something bigger. Thus they are a prop which has multiple functions.
In future iterations we’d have other questions, keeping some fundamental ones, but adding in others in relation to the contexts they will be used in. The design readily accommodates this, it will be easy to add and remove pages. We’d also bind the pages at the other end for ease of writing in, and use a lighter card stock as there was still some reluctance to write on what felt like such high quality stock.
We hope to bring together the Do Fest and Paint Dudley detectorists to ask them about using the lanyards, as well as the content of what they found. This open and shared learning will help us develop this detectorism tool together.
Related posts:
- using festival signals to inform Do Fest 2019 design
- Do Fest Experiment #1: A parklet
- Do Fest Experiment #2: Zero Waste conversations and making
- Do Fest Experiment #3: Doing in Dudley Market with Do Fest Friends
- Do Fest Experiment #4: Imaginative ideas from other places
- Do Fest Experiment #5: Invitations to make art on the High Street
- Do Fest Experiment #6: Paint Dudley sign writing
- Do Fest Experiment #7: Animating the Inhedge
