Environmental Behavior Assignment: "Welcome to Caw-fee Tsawk*, No Big Whoop"

So, as you can probably tell by now, whenever I have a chance to make a reference in my titles to something from popular culture—even if the reference is only slightly related to the post's content— I do not shy away from the opportunity.
For this assignment, Haylee, Isaac, and I decided to investigate coffee shops in the U District. Specifically, we wanted to see how the various inanimate aspects of a café (lighting, size, arrangement of furniture, music) affect animate objects—that is to say, how a café’s nonliving elements (both visual and audio) affect the behavior of the people in the café by dictating the implied social norms for the given coffee shop. Thus, to a certain degree, our topic of inquiry builds off a key aspect of Lynch’s A Walk Around the Block, which argues that we need to imbue order into an environment in order to make sense of it, thus essentially implying that there is nothing inherent or natural about various urban spaces; they are constantly constructed and reconstructed by the people utilizing the spaces in an unending dialectic in which subject affects object affects subject...
For our investigation, we looked at three cafés—Solstice, Star Life on the Oasis, and Trabant—the latter two of which we investigated in greatest depth. As our observations focused primarily on the inanimate elements of the café, we definitely employed the kind of research techniques that John Zeisel explores in Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behavior Research when he discusses the method of observing physical traces. Utilizing various forms of documenting our research, we: 1) listed our observations, 2) took photos of the cafes from various angles (thanks to Haylee), and 3) drew floor plans (thanks to Isaac). Before presenting our findings, I would just like to interject with a comment that is--albeit somewhat obvious-- worthy of mentioning: We did not really hone in on our question until we did some preliminary observing, or should I say, visual research. Thus, we did not enter the first coffee shop with a concrete question in mind. Now, for some this may seem like an obvious and logical process (as can be seen by the way Clifford constructed this assignment ("from your observations develop a research question"), but, I do not think that it really felt intuitive for me to observe before asking a question that would allow me to further observe! Part of me I wanted to enter the given topic (observing coffee shops) with a fully formulated question. However, I quickly learned that, somewhat paradoxically, some research (whether it be via observing or reading or any other 'ing') is required before one can inquire about a place and do more substantive research. Again, this is a fairly obvious conclusion to draw, but it made me value something that I think I have begun to take for granted: the importance of just...seeing.

Part 1: Field Research

Cafe 1: Star Life on the Oasis

List of Observations
· One window
· Classical music (followed by non-classical, but still instrumental music)
· Small
· Barista not visible from many parts of the café
· Medium lighting
· Looks like a house
· Pastel colored walls
· Low ceilings
· Lack of view of the outside
· Entrance is not right near the street
· Quiet
· Max of 2 people per table observed
· Mismatched ‘potpourri’ of furniture
· 4 computers; 19 people
· Hours: Sun-Mon, 9-11; Tues, closed; Wed-Sat, 9-10:30

Photos

Floor Plan (please see Isaac's blog for better resolution)





Cafe 2: Trabant

List of Observations

• Very open; two-story
• More uniform, thematic
• Industrial theme
  - dark colors: black tables and chairs, brown and blue walls
  - a lot of metal material
  - urban photos on the walls
  - “unfinished” floors on the second floor, giving the room an apparently intentional “incomplete” room
  - Piping on the outside of the wall
• Lot of space between tables; like islands
• Dimmer lighting, but many large windows
• Max of 4 people per table observed
• Acoustics – loud kitchen whose noise is even more amplified by the openness of the space
• Bar seating
• High ceilings with large hanging lights
• 12 computers; 29 people
• Hours: Mon-Fri, 6:30-midnight; Sat-Sun, 9-midnight

Photos

Floor Plan

Cafe 3: Solstice

During the time we were in Solstice, we actually did not know that we were going to do a survey of various cafes; the café was simply the meeting place that we designated at the end of our last class meeting. Hence, we did not investigate the café in any great detail. However, I recall a few observations that became significant in light of our subsequent investigations of Trabant and Star Life:

• loud music
• bright lighting
• various places to sit
• next to tables (of varying sizes)
• on a sofa
• near the baristas, on barstools
• Baristas visible from anywhere in the large cafe
• they are in a very central location
• their space reminded me of a stage: well lit, central, visible by the entire audience that it faces
• very urban location
• directly on the Ave.
• near a busy bus-stop

Part 2: Analysis

Upon gathering all of the information we collected via various procedures, we were able to draw some very interesting conclusions about the interplay of the living and the inanimate in cafes. Trabant and Solstice were both relatively large, spatially open cafes. The people in these two coffee shops talked with higher frequency and in a louder volume, and were more likely to gather in larger groups. And thus, it seems that, as my biology teacher once told me, structure fits function. But we must remember that there is nothing 'natural' about the various structures of cafes; instead, using Star Life, Solstice, and Trabant as reference points, we can observe that cafes possess specific and intentional constructions and arrangements that then imply a certain decorum for each cafe. Just the physical environments of Trabant and Solstice fostered more, and louder, conversations, conversely, Star Life accomplished the opposite with the design of its physical space -- which can be encapsulated by the following anecdote. As Haylee, Isaac, and I were sitting in Star Life -- observing the soft lighting and music, the small tables, and correlating these observations with the lack of noise or group formations, we started hypothesizing that perhaps the physical aspects of this space were affecting the way the people in it acted. Just as I exuberantly, in a volume barely above a whisper, conveyed this to Haylee and Isaac, I received a cold, harsh look from a woman at a nearby table.

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* My attempt to transliterate how Mike Meyers, playing a middle-aged New York woman, says ‘Coffee Talk’ on the SNL skit “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman.”