Gang Leader for a Day

Chapter 1
This was a good introduction to the book, it helped me get into the story and want to read further. He had a way of pulling me into the story with how he got into the whole predicament on the stairs.

Chapter 2
I was surprised that J.T would allow him to come back and continue his study. It was interesting to see how Sudhir went about conducting his research, how he told J.T it was a biography about him but he didn't even know what he was going to write. Also the end of chapter 2 was crazy since J.T beat up C-Note and Sudhir saw everything.

Chapter 3
This chapter had a lot of information in it, from the lady screaming at the store owner to Sudhir finding another person to talk to about the gang activity in Aultry. How J.T reacted to Sudhir finding someone else to talk to was actually kind of surprising, I thought he wouldn't care but he ended up making Sudhir not go to a certain meeting just cause he was there with Aultry and not him.

Chapter 4
This was one of the most interesting chapters, Sudhir got to lead the gang for a day. He didn't get to do everything of course but he did get to make a few decisions. I was surprised to see how much went into being a gang leader and getting instructions to people.

Chapter 5
This chapter was kind of surprising, it was weird to see what Ms. Bailey does and what kind of power she has over some people. It's almost like she is her own version of J.T, she is kind of like the leader of the tenants and collects what she has to when she has to.

Chapter 6
Sudhir continued to surprise me with how naive he could be, he interview a bunch of people about how much money they made and how they went about making it and then he told Ms. Bailey and J.T how much they made. People said that this was on the side so it should have been obvious that they didn't let them know everything about their financial situations.

Chapter 7
I was shocked to see that this was the first chapter where someone actually got shot, hearing the stories of gangs and stuff I assumed that someone would have gotten shot sooner. At the end I really wanted to know how the big meeting he was supposed to go to was going to go.

Chapter 8
Chapter 8 was just a closing chapter to me, it was one of the more boring chapters. It was basically just telling the reader what everyone ended up doing.

Book Reaction
Overall I thought this was a very good read, a lot better than what we have read so far in this class. It was interesting and I actually wanted to read the whole book to see what happend to the author. He presented his work very well and really pulled the reader into the story and helped the reader empathize with some of the characters. What I mean is that even though some of these people were in gangs I still could see where they were coming from and why they did the things that they did. I liked the way the author presented his findings, he created a story that the reader would be drawn into then along the way he would tell you his findings throughout the entire book and I just thought that it was a pretty good way to do that.

I did think that he wasn't entirely truthful in his book, some of the things that he did were just way too naive for someone to do. It was like he played off on that and just ran with it, like when he was surprised that J.T beat up C-Note, J.T was a leader of a gang in Chicago there was bound to be some violence and he really should have just expected it rather than be shocked by it. Other than that the book in my opinion was one of the best books we have read in this class so far and I probably would have read it outside of class had I picked it up and started reading it randomly.

Ethnography Idea

I was thinking that I could do one on people who are hardcore/professional gamers, people that make money to play games and things like that. Also I was thinking it would be cool to look into people that are really into the electronic dance scene, people that go to EDC, Lights all Night, and day glow.

Homework #7

It was pretty fun doing the videos of our set activity. I was more intrigued than I thought I would be, it was interesting to think how different people could do the same task so differently. Also it was cool to see how people reacted to someone wearing a hat with an obvious camera on, you could always tell when someone was looking straight into the camera. Watching my own video was weird since you could see how I walked and what I looked at in the process of doing our activity. It was also cool to hear what was being said at the time and the different sounds people heard even though we will not hear that in class when we see the videos. The only thing that sucked about doing our videos was we had to change our plan since the place we were originally going to go to was closed. With that though I thought it would have been interesting to go ahead and do your own thing and not tell the next person the place was closed and see how people treated the situation of the place being closed, whether they went somewhere else or they went back to the group to find out what they were supposed to do.

Things that I think you could notice that are non-obvious are the way someone walks or you can tell when someone is short or tall no matter where the camera was. You can also notice what they are looking at to maybe tell what gender they are. The speed of the walk could also be key along with where they are looking whether it was in front of them or down or somewhere else. You could also look at how people reacted to the person recording and whether or not they were familiar with a place. 

All in all I think looking at the classes videos will be fun and figuring out who is who will be a challenge. Using the non-obvious things in the video will be tough for some people I think, including myself, but will be entertaining for everyone 

Homework #5: Ethnography

The first 2 articles were just describing and defining what ethnography was, the 3rd one was about a woman named Margaret Mead who used Ethnography to write a book about a culture in Samoa. Since we had already talked about what an ethnography were in essence in class the first 2 were pretty much just refreshers on what it was. The second was was a little more interesting since it was about a book someone wrote and how she went about gathering information for it.

The first article was just a page with different definitions for ethnography from different sources like Merriam-Webster and The New Oxford American Dictionary. They all pretty much said the same thing about ethnography, that it was a process in which people try to understand a society that they may not be familiar with.

The second article was just the wiki page about ethnography going over the definition and the basics of ethnography. It also have the insight from different fields of study and how ethnography pertained to that field. It also elaborated on the ethics and ways to evaluate ethnography.

The last article was the most interesting as it was about a book that was produced using ethnography. The book she wrote was top book in the world of anthropology for a while, even though a guy named Derek Freeman said her work was false.

All of these articles were pretty interesting to read and really gave me a different look at what all ethnography entailed and how it has been used in different fields of study. It was interesting to see how Mead gathered her research and how it was received by different people.

Book Reading #2: Emotional Design

In the book emotional design the author presented the idea of design based on how things look and the fact that if they looked better they would be more usable. This seemed to me to be a complete opposite idea of what the same author presented in the book Design of Everyday Things. In the the previous book I remember reading that the author thought that making things aesthetically pleasing was not the way to go when designing things for the user, but in this book Chapter one is all about designing things that way and the pros of it.

The main idea of this is that emotions are a big factor when people are thinking about ways to solve things. The author mentions studies where people were found to brainstorm/problem solve better when in a good mood rather than when they were in a bad mood. The purpose of mentioning that was because he hypothesized that people would be able to figure out something they were getting wrong easier if the thing they were working with made them happy. He also mentioned a study about ATMs where the buttons were arranged "attractively", the study found that people like the ones where the buttons were arranged in an attractive way rather than a normal way.

The main difference in the 2 book written by this author was the way he said to go about designing things and the way he said people should be able to figure things out. In Design of Everyday Things he said that things should come natural to people and that designers should think of that rather than what the device looked like. He even came up with examples that looked good but were terrible designs. In this one chapter of Emotional Design he stated that attractive things work well, which to me means that designers should focus on what the device looks like rather than the usability for the user.