FIELD NOTES
UNIVERSITY CENTER CAFETERIA
Victoria Blakemore
SIGN VEHICALS
- Fashion
- The art supplies being carried around
- LANGUAGES
- German
- Spanish
- English
- British
- Australian
- Canadian
- American
- Southern accents
- Unidentifiable American English accents
- Slang terms, many I don’t know
- French
- Chinese
- Portuguese (I think)
- Italian
- Russian (I think)
- Japanese
DESIGN AND ORDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE
- MANY people using the design of the cafeteria eating area to their advantage
- Stairs as seats
- Tables as a place to study
- A lot of people sitting alone in order to look out the window on 14th street
- Large windows and high ceilings make the place feel open and calming
- Design of the actual cafeteria serving area could be improved
- Long lines
- Small space
- Lots of ways to leave without paying (saw this happen twice)
RELATIONSHIPS IN THE PUBLIC – INTERACTION AND IDENTITY
- most people are alone
- some with a with
- a lot of students would run into a friend or classmate and briefly say hi but not invite them to eat with them
- conversational encounters are mostly brief and about school
FACE WORK
- Common expressions
- Exhaustion
- Annoyance
- Laughter
- Joy (when eating)
- MANY people looking tired
THE DRESSED BODY
- Dress is obviously very important in this place
- Nearly everyone has a unique style
- Rare to see the same shirt or items of clothing twice
- LOTS of expensive clothing and accessories
- Louis Vuitton
- Cartier
- Hermes
- Goyard
- YSL
- Gosha rubinski
- Supreme
- Even the people showing exhaustion or fatigue seem to have put a lot of effort into their outfits, this is not surprising though because parsons is a very fashion oriented school
MEMORY – THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY
- People seem to have their own typical table
- Memories I have associated with the cafeteria/eating area
- Long waits
- Being late to class because there’s no clock in the eating area and I lost track of time
- The time I toured parsons and knew it was the school I wanted to attend
FINAL THOUGHTS AND NOTES
- After sitting in the cafeteria the most notable thing I found was the amount of languages.
- There was so many foreign languages it seemed it was almost a 50/50 split between English and foreign languages.
- New School students have a lot of money, it’s obviously a very affluent school based on the clothing worn by the students
- This isn’t not surprising however just based on how much the tuition is and its location in Manhattan
Everyone seemed to be very focused on their studies. This was shown by the amount of stress and exhaustion on the students faces. It was also shown when I realized the majority of conversations were school related. The conversations however seemed to be more pas
