Create Your Own Fieldnote!
“Field research generates inspired insight that enables the team to ask smarter, different, and more nuanced questions. The answers then provide unique perspectives on which the new can be built.” (Jan Chipchase, The Field Study Handbook, 2018)
 Fieldnote is the note that you record during your observational research. Observational research is to collect information about how things, people, and systems behave, interact, and change over time. It observes the specific field, which means a kind of site.
The more observation research you did, the more ideas you develop. You can refine your prototypes and then conduct tests based on them. Finally may choose to observe in a new field in order to improve the outcomes. This process can be repeated again and again until the deadline’s coming (if any). For instance, if you are a designer, you should finish the process before the deadline and create the final product. But if you are a geologist, there might be no ending of research.
Before starting the fieldnote, you may consider what you want to observe and how to record it. I was living in a vacation village, and there are many decorative elements outside my window, so I chose to observe them and their structures in my fieldnote.
Since things might change continuously, you may have to sketch them quickly and simply. The drawing does not aim to create a beautiful picture but to record the information in a short time.
The outcome is quite interesting, if there is no caption of each thing, others may not understand what I’m drawing. But you know what are they because you actually saw them. So that words are necessary to include in your fieldnote to provide a better understanding of it. Moreover, in case you forget what you have drawn, it’s better to write a caption next to your drawing. Your notes might become important learning material for others. Ensure that your records can be understandable and help others know what you have seen and your thoughts about it.
There are many things we cannot tell by others, such as their feelings, we are able to gain our own experience by directly participating in the observation instead of just looking at others’ writing on a website. Creating fieldnotes, we might find some interesting phenomena that were not expected. Although the observers can only see superficial or a part of things, it is still worthwhile to do the observation to combine a variety of information together and have a new discovery.
