People Watching in CBD

Today we went on a field trip to the CBD to observe people in their natural environment, the city centre. We chose to go to Lambton quay at lunch time as we thought that this was filled with people that fell into our target audience. It was also the busiest place in Wellington where we thought we would witness the most stress and interesting activity. As I am from Upper Hutt I don't often walk around Wellington city so I really enjoyed this new busy environment. What I found most interesting about this people watching was how amongst the chaos there was an in the foot traffic where people were literally acting like cars in traffic (e.g. sticking to the left, overtaking, having a speed limit and even some form of indication before changing direction). This was quite amusing/entertaining to observe while sitting down but as soon as we starting walking we found ourselves subconsciously following these road rules. Another thing we noticed was that people showed no form of interaction with each other unless to share a joke or embarrassing moment to share in the joy. An example of this was when a man ducked for a pigeon and saw us watching we laughed it off together, which was the first form of interaction all day. So from these observations we started asking what if questions in an attempt break this stigma of head down don't interact and get to destination. My first test was to simple yell out a loud bird-like noise to see who was engaged in their real surrounding. When I yelled only one man looked up in a disgusted manor as if to say to me that I had intruded his anti social bubble he was in. We then tried making direct eye contact and smiling at people as we walked by. we got more responses from this experiment. A mixed range it seemed that the kids and senior citizens smiled back but the business people remained unresponsive (and one construction worker took my smile and eye contact as flirting :/ ). I found this to be a great insight in how serious and professional the business people thought that they needed to be. This was also seen in the balloon video that we recorded on our work blog. This field trip has been very helpful with our journey maps and gaining a greater understanding/empathy for our target audience.