Metro ride observations: An ethnographic vignette
I got on the metro on Thursday at 2:23pm going from Rockville to DuPont circle, where I had a networking event to attend. I walked onto the train, took a seat, took out my notebook, and started sketching logos for one of the projects I‘ve been assigned. A few minutes later, 3 more people walked in, and the doors closed.
One of the passengers was a young lady, mid 20’s, very casually dressed, talking on her phone. As I was brainstorming, I couldn’t help but to listen in on her *hilarious* conversation. It wasn’t until after she got off the train that I realized I had finally created a logo that I liked (I was particularly having a problem with this assignment, so that was very refreshing). I also realized that for the first time ever, I had managed to not touch my phone during the entire metro ride(ok fine, almost the entire time).
At one point during the ride, I decided to make some observations about the people who were around me. Out of the six immediate people in sight, four were on there phones, one was reading a newspaper, and the other was napping. What I realized through this observations was that although majority of people were on their phones, it created somewhat of a silent interaction between the passengers. Take the girl speaking on her phone for example. At one point in her conversation she started talking about *Brandon, “the guy who got a boner at that dinner once.” This was such an unexpected, but hysterical thing to hear someone talking about, that my head suddenly popped up from my notebook and locked eyes with the girl sitting across from me, who also happened to have a smirk on her face. Because of another passenger’s phone call, I was able to tap into my creativity for an assignment that I had been stuck on for a couple days, and I was also able to make a slight connection with someone else.
I have touched on the topic of creativity before, but how does one exactly measure creativity? Many people will tell you different things when asked this question, and I think it’s because it’s a pretty subjective thing to scale. For myself, creativity is based off of how innovative I feel that a design is, or the level of complexity a design has compared to previous attempts. Schaarschmidt et al.’s paper discusses how “creativity is influenced by various behavioural aspects, such as motivation, risk, support, and even dissatisfaction.” He goes on to explain that motivation is broken down into to subcategories: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, motivation through enjoyment vs. motivation through pressure respectively. This makes me wonder how these two different types of motivation have effected my own work. I think that for me in particular, it’s a mixture of the two when I work. I love what I do, so that’s intrinsic, but I also have deadlines to meet, which gives me external motivation.
In design, my hypothesis that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation holds true for many people as design is something that requires a level of passion and enthusiasm to allow for great products. But what about in the case of more technical jobs? Since I work with so many developers, I figured that the best way for me to answer this question would be to interview some developers and see how they tap into their creativity for software developments. My hypothesis is that these guys work later in the day to help them focus, and seeing how much time they spend together in working on these projects, they most likely have also synched up work ethic. Stay tuned for the interview(s)!
