Ruchita Lodha || Jamie Monville || Gina Herakovic || Kaavya Samu

Introduction

In Milestone 1, we determined that our project would focus on security of belongings while in shared workspaces. We defined our target audience as college students or young professionals who often go to places like libraries and coffee shops to get work done.

In Milestone 1, we found that people are either likely to take their belongings with them or ask a stranger to watch them in order to protect their belongings from being stolen. We also discovered that others will often study with friends, just so that they can secure their items as they sit in a public place. We also learned that when individuals are asked to watch items that belong to a stranger, they do so with mixed feelings and attention spans. For Milestone 2, we decided to look towards understanding how people work when they are in a public place and redefining our scope to better adapt our problem statement to an audience who would benefit the most from protecting their belongings.

Research Questions

Our studies were designed to address the following research questions:

  1. What does it mean for your belongings to be “safe”?
  2. How do people feel about keeping their belongings safe in a public workspace?
  3. What are the actions that people take when concerned about the safety of their belongings?
  4. What do people need to study? What would they take with them to a public place to do so?
  5. When watching a stranger’s stuff, how closely do people monitor it?
  6. How often do people get up and move around in a place, leaving their stuff?

Study Design: Diary Study

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We designed a diary study in order to understand how individuals currently study. Due to the pandemic, we were unable to ask the participants to show us how their work or study set up would look in a public workspace. Instead, we asked for an image every time they sat down to study over the course of three days. To recruit our participants, we identified a range of people that we knew who were currently studying and fit our target demographic and asked them to participate in both of our studies. We asked them if they were available to send us images every day for three days, as well as to schedule a Zoom call for a follow up with some questions as well as an interview.

Over the course of three days each, we had 6 participants send us an image every time they sat down at their workspace. We also asked for them to set up what their table would look like if they were to be working or studying in a public space. The participants could either send it immediately or all at the end of their 3 days of participating in the diary study. Doing so electronically would make it easier for them to participate.