The second day – research day – of the workshop ’Designing for Ownership’ was dedicated to fieldwork research in the area. Make and Shriya from Partizaning had done some excellent preparatory fieldwork, so we did have a pretty good idea of what to expect. In a sense this fieldtrip already was a follow-up research and second iteration. We started this second day with a brief introduction of how to do fieldwork research. Then we went together to Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo to get a better understanding of the neighborhood and talk to as many people as possible.

   

We split into two teams: one ‘green team’ that did research in the park, and a ‘grey team’ that did research in the residential area. These were the locations that we felt were the most important to pay attention to. The teams were instructed to do a SWOT analysis of the area: what are its present strong and weak points, and what are the potential future opportunities and threat for this neighborhood? They also had to collect as much information as possible about the various stakeholders in the area. We also talked to a very active neighborhood dwellers, Genya, who has been trying to realize change in Medvedkovo and contributed many ideas for improvement.

  

We used Google Maps to pinpoint issues to locations if possible. We also shared fieldwork notes and audio-visual media by using Google Drive. Click on the map below to go to the annotated map with some visual impressions: