Team Weevil Weekly Report

Week 10, 05-MAR to 11-MAR

Objectives

This week we aimed to synthesize our ethnographic research findings, brainstorm artifacts to represent them both short and long term, and plan our research for the rest of the semester leading into our mid-semester presentation next week.

Actions

Research Synthesis

Synthesis session

Our team synthesized our findings by reading one another’s research notes, and writing down the most salient findings we saw. We then clustered them to see bigger trends across our interviews and fly on the wall observations. This represented 23 interviews and 6 observation session in hotels on the island and is a precursor to a more final set of synthesis sessions after in-depth interviews.

Output with research findings

Next Steps

We planned our next steps of research, which was guided by our goals and our findings from our synthesis.

We plan to:

• Do in-depth interviews with tourists on Madeira
• Do in-depth interviews “expert travelers”
• Do service safaris and observe guests interactions with 6 hotels on the mainland
• Perform contextual inquiry and observation of hotel staff. We will recruit through two channels: 1. our connection with the operations firm who manages a number of hotels; 2. reaching out through M-ITI’s executive director to the hotels we are visiting.

Research Artifacts

We had a meeting to discuss the artifacts we would produce from our research, and brainstormed future artifacts from our next month of research. We split these up to work on for next week’s presentation.

Next Steps

1. Finalize research artifacts and prepare mid-semester presentation
2. Begin in-depth interviews
3. Prepare for weekend travel to London and Lisbon for hotel visits