Task 3 - "Design safari"

For this task i decided to observe somewhere i am quiet familiar with, the bus stop! As i get the bus into uni through the week and work at the weekend i am pretty familiar with the process in which my 45 minute - 1 hour journey takes! So usually what happens is i leave my house in Carnoustie at around 8 each morning which then gets me into Dundee at about 9...

Today i am the first person at the bus stop i have approximately a 5 minute wait for the bus. As i wait it becomes clear that the bus is late... 5 minutes pass to 10 minutes and eventually it comes. What i noticed though is that when people walked towards the bus stop they stood around the corner behind a building... It was a very windy day and at this particular stop there was no shelter... So one by one they crossed over the busy main road and gradually popped their heads out from the corner, to see if the bus was coming...

I found this quite clever as the were almost creating a new bus shelter that i hadn't been aware of. As i stood and waited in the open being blown about and sand blowing in my face i felt quite silly that i hadn't thought of that before! for me i am a regular super bus-goer! and these pensioners out-smarted me!

So eventually the bus came and the pensioners raced to hop on the bus but what i noticed was i was almost the decoy! because i was standing there the bus had to stop and let me on... but if i wasn't there would they have waited that couple of meters away?! Quite a crucial distance for their zimmer frames!! ... So i decided to test this..

.The next day at the same time... I decided to do what they did the previous day, so i left my house that little bit later and lesuirely walked out to get the bus. There was no one on the corner so i thought to myself... "mmm that interesting!" as i walked around the corner i saw that there were 3 old ladies at the bus stop (2 of which were their the day before)... so i decided to wait on teh corner untill teh bus came... i wanted to see if the bus driver would treat me any differently than they would treat a pensioner! (obviously it would be a different driver and maybe it wasnt that much of a windy day... but in general i did wee experiment) so as i saw the bus appearing in the distance i gradually started to walk towards the bus stop when the bus passed me, the pensioners got on and the doors shut! I had to run and flag down the bus before it drove off without me...

As i got on the double decker bus i noticed there was a teenage boy sitting at the front of the bus on the lower floor. I decided to sit at the back of the bus and observe how people reacted as they got on the bus... (note: the boy had a cast on his foot/leg? so he must have not been able to get up the stairs) I found this interesting because as the oldies got on the bus they glared at the boy as if he should move but in fact he deserves the seat as much as they did, if not more... i found it really funny as well because he was wearing adidas track suit bottoms with the stripes down the sides and a grey hoody... so maybe this posed as a threat to the oldies! no one sat next to him until they had to and even then they turned their backs and talked to their friends. he struggled to get off the bus and no one helped him. I have witnessed hundreds of times people helping frail elderly people up but what made him so different? was it his clothes? if he was wearing something else would he have gotten a help? Maybe his body language showed he didnt want to be helped? Everyone completely ignored him even the bus conductor...