Leaving the field

Leaving the field to start a new project can bring satisfaction. However, Harlem was still looking much like the same. I had understood that the project was a learning opportunity inside a pedagogical context; we didn’t have any responsibilities or real commitment with any institution. No one had hired us to change anything; it was more of an experiment. Nevertheless I found myself wondering if I wanted to change something over there. After all, I had engaged people from the community, they gave us their time and complained about many people that had come to them, but ended up not compromising with a long tem project. As designers had we accomplished our goal? Where was our responsibility as practitioners of that field?

With the end of Harlem Collaboration Project also came the end my ethnographic research. The downside of not having changed anything in Harlem came along with the upside of having a great experience in Transcidiscplinary Design program. The cohort of summer 2016 had “adopted” me in their group and I still go to the 12th floor to help friends with their thesis and to get help with my portfolio. Had my presence there changed something? Had I left a mark in the field I was exploring?

As confusing as double fieldworking can be, I might have, unintentionally, mixed the outcomes of each project. I didn’t change what was supposed to be changed, and changed what wasn’t supposed to be changed. However I may only realize that because by writing this ethnography I was able to go through a process of sense making that, like prototyping, inscribes discussions of the life in motion into the materiality of things.

To write ethnography is not just to follow a genre, but is to dive into an inquiry process. It is to revisit the life you found in fieldwork, interviews, and notes building your own set of lenses. You are then able to look carefully into the details that make each narrator and her story unique.