I guess I have not yet written about experiences on my first day of field work. There was a lot of information and many questions to deal with. I have been using most of my energy to process the data into usable work notes, not write about it here. What I will write about are my negative thoughts on the “success” of my work and whether or not it will translate into good research and design ideas. I just had a revelation that pulled me from these negative thoughts - yay!
On Friday I made note of some advice for myself: 1) get out of my head and end the analyzing, 2) be patient and watch. I felt that I was missing out on interesting social patterns in the public. If I could just sit in one spot for a very long time and pay close attention to everything, some remarkable and translatable insights would eventually surface.


But I was just reading this paper, “The Limits of Ethnography: Combining Social Sciences for CSCW” (Shapiro, D., 1994) and something was totally clarified for me (I don`t know if this was from the paper or from my processed version of it). Basically, I was expecting to have things jump out at me, things “so common yet weird that they are weirder”. Most of the observations I made seemed sloppy and obtuse. I was worried that everything I observed would be biased by all the “strange things from Japan” websites I looked at before I came here. “Oh look…bikes don`t get stolen…and there is another girl in a maid costume”. I mean, of course, these things are interesting…but are they what I went out for?
What I should be looking for generally is how people construct social order. This is not found only by searching for the weird and different, even though they can make for some interesting stories and pictures, but also in considering the mundane and everyday.
What I didn`t really get was how I can also look at myself as a reflection of the everyday. We are all continuously observing and analyzing social order so that we can determine how we should act in particular settings, mostly with the intentions of “looking good” to someone or everyone. How do I behave in train stations and department stores as a reaction to my interpretation of the social environment? When am I uncertain over how I should act? What does this reveal about the social order?
I have to be careful here because I risk jumping back into my head and relating everything to myself. But I think I was wrong before, when I thought that I would have to completely lose my identity to be aware of interesting things going on. How I construct my identity is a key source for observations on how *things* happen *here* (intentional vagueness in that last part).