These initial, and yes, superficial, observations made me wonder what I would discover if I undertook a wider analysis of private advertisements placed in newsagents' windows across Hackney. Within social science research it would seem that it was something that hadn't been researched, other than within the wider context of the selling of secondhand goods. They seemed to me a visible site of exchange, one that gave you a microcosmic sense of all the 'stuff' circulating throughout the borough.
Some of the advertisements also had a pleasing handwritten quality, in particular many of the massage ads used chunky marker pens, often on flourescent cards. Was this a kind of branding strategy at work?
But I needed to develop some kind of method to aid my analysis. As Hackney is a large borough there was no way it was going to be practical to assess all the shops that had ads in their windows—my deadline says September 30 2011, and I think that would keep me occupied till well beyond then. I needed some way of sampling the shops in order to make the task manageable. The Freecycle project had proved relatively easy in that respect as I was able to take one week of messages per month, over a period of six months. However, dealing with an unknown number of shops and advertisements within a relatively large geographical space was more complex. One thing the Freecycle project did provide was a sense that people tended to use the letter(s) and first number of their postcode (E5 or N16 for example) as a way of making it easy for other people to get a rough idea of where the item was. It also gave a clear indication that the more 'active' areas of Hackney in relation to stuff were E5, E8, E9, and N16. N4, N1, EC1 and EC2 are partly in Hackney, but they are perhaps more closely related to Haringey, Islington and the City, and made little impact on the Freecycle stats, so I chose to leave them out of the newsagents analysis.
My first attempt to identify the particular shops within the postcode areas seems a little pseudo scientific and a bit stupid now. I simply took a map of Hackney, outlined all the small postcode areas N16 6, N16 7, N16 8, etc, and located the rough centre of each area as the place in which to locate the nearest shop and advertisements. Obviously I did miss out the large expanses of park and marshland, as I was pretty sure most shops would be in residential areas. In my defence, I wasn't convinced that I would necessarily find a shop near this point, nor that it would be representative of that small area. For example, the centre method left Stamford Hill junction out of the equation, even though I knew it to be well populated with shop windows containing adverts.
Still, off I set on my bike. It became fairly apparent quite quickly that many of my defined 'centres' were certainly not centres of activity in relation to ads in windows. Indeed, many of them didn't have a shop visible nearby and I was reduced to cycling the streets in order to try and find one. At this point the 'science' of the method went totally out of the window as I set off in whatever direction I fancied, probably in relation to which side of the road I was on!
So, back to the drawing board. The 'inhuman' postcode boundary evident on a map does not give a coordinate that relates to the use of place in everyday life. I looked at using the main thoroughfares as a way of defining the shops, Kingsland Rd, Mare St, etc, but many of them were borders for the postcode areas, so if I wanted to retain the area definition established by Freecycyle, that wasn't going to work. I then went back to look at the first few photos that I had taken to see if anything was evident in them that could help me define my method. I realised that both the Upper Clapton and Stoke Newington Church St shots had been taken in areas that were very close to a local Post Office. I used to live round the corner from the Upper Clapton Post Office on Mount Pleasant, and I knew it to be a well used office, that seemed to be a part of the local community. For example, on pension days, a queue would form, predominantly of older ladies, well before opening time, and it seemed to be part of their weekly routine to use this waiting time to share their news and perhaps discuss the local gossip. Post Offices seemed like they could be away to go. After the swathes of cuts there certainly wouldn't be too many sites to research and it would seem likely that the ones that were left were in areas that also had well used local shops. Within my four main postcode areas I identified 15 Post Offices. They were reasonably equally spread in relation to size of area apart from E5 which only has two. But what can you do, them's the breaks for E5.
So, off I set on my bike again, and what do you know, it seemed to work, the first five post ofices I went to all had a shop or shops nearby with ads in the window. This journey started to throw up the occasional other method wrinkle to be smoothed. At 'Victoria Village', the shop that was closest to the Post Office with the most advertisements was a greengrocers. Should I branch out beyond Newsagents? I decided I should as what was important was the ads and the community, and if they used this shop as a prime site, then that was good enough for me. This proved to be a good decision in the end as some small supermarkets that sold food targeted towards specific cultures led me to find pockets of ads targeted at very particular communities, especially Polish and Chinese. These shops almost seemed to function as community noticeboards.
Occasionally anomalies would seem to crop up. The Post Office on Dunsmure Road was amongst a really well used set of local shops, in a relatively small road, within a Hasidic Jewish area of N16, however, there were no shops that had ads in the windows. I wonder if this is a cultural thing? I wonder if I'll ever find out? I did find other Post Offices without ads nearby, but these were either on large roads that did not encourage much pedestrian traffic, or were in small shopping centres that were quite deprived and seemingly not as well used. I also had to decide the cut off point in term sof distance from the Post Office, as some streets, Stoke Newington Church St, for example, has many shops that carried ads in the window. By trial and error I decided on approximately 75 metres, so not to include too many, but not to end up with too few for analysis.
Once I had got the shops all logged and photographed I now had to start thinking about what I was actually going to do with it all...and this is where it all started to go a bit Pete Tong...
As I was gathering the material I had started to think about looking at the types of things advertised, did they relate to areas in any way, were the ads handwritten or done on a PC, what kind of language do people use to sell their stuff, etc. Some of these became headings on my 'coding schedule'but as I went on I still felt I was getting no closer to identifying content of interest, never mind an idea for a design project to capture this content. Ithink perhaps one of the reasons was that the ads ar far less personal than the messages sent out via Freecycle. These ads are matter of fact, even most of the rooms for rent ones, there is little there of the person who is advertsisng, there is little in the way of personal narrative to pick up on. They remian adverts for unknown passers by as opopsed to the message a Freecycler sends to the group they belong to. As the ads were not analysed over time, there was also not an overall narrative of changes and fluctuations evident either. The data felt very 'empty' and quite superficial I suppose. But I still had to carry on, as even a 'failure' of a project offers useful insights as to how to do things differently next time.
I did discover certain types of ads had visual traits. The majority of rooms for rent (75%) were handwritten advertisements mostly using black biro, and massage ads were mostly handwritten (87.5%), often using marker pens. I did discover that there were seven times as many rooms for rent ads as there were 'man and van' ads—clearly a man with a van will never be out of work in Hackney. But all of these discoveries seemed to remain very quantitive in nature and not offer me anything to get my teeth into to in order to tell a story about Hackney through the design. In fact, in desperation I began to attempt to develop pieces of information deisgn (or perhaps misinformation as some of them weren't really very good) to solve my problem.
But what was the point, it was just the skeletal landscape of statistics.
I tried to start incorporating some of the ads within the information graphics, using the format of cards. But these didn't really hang together comfortably.
I then decided to try and use the stats I had generated, but visualise these by using the language of the ads themselves. So the percetanges were translated into proportions and these areas filled with typography taken from the ad cards. This began, at least, to have some human quality. Different languages were evident and different stances towards certain parts of the population—No DSS and DSS welcomed for example.
Although I am not particularly excited about the design of these posters, I think they are going to have to do as time is marching on. But the travails of the project have revealed things worth writing about. Also, perhaps I need to ask myself what is wrong with superficiality? It is one view of place, and a view that one would get if one just passes by ads like these. The engagement with them, unless, for example, you are looking for a room, is superficial. You are likely to just vaguely read them if waiting for a bus, or waiting to meet a friend. There is also a danger that to keep suggesting one should go beyond such representations to a 'deeper' representation of placeimplies that there is a 'truth' that can be found, when clearly place is a multi-faceted, polyphonic entity. If I had wanted to generate a more clearly 'peopled' project, then perhaps I should have contacted those who were advertising items and then I could have explored a more personal story of shared houses, dog breeding, and carpenters for hire or perhaps a more political story of women caught up in the sex trade. Not only did time preclude this, but I had set this project out in contrast to the personal explorations of the 'stuff' book. It was always to be the last of the trilogy, a less close up view. Perhaps its not surprising then, that what I have generated seems relatively impersonal. So, don't know why I was worrying, it was obviously meant to be like this from the outset. Doh!
No comments:
Post a Comment