Week 7 Round: The laundromat, the waiting room

The strictest Round. An involuntary public place, observed without notes in the room, with a hard list of sites that are out of bounds.

15 April 2027

Read this whole brief before you choose a site.

Out of bounds, without exception. Hospital and clinic waiting rooms. Any mental health, sexual health or addiction service. Court buildings. Social security offices. Places of worship during a service. Schools. Any site where the people present are identifiable as users of a specific service. The reason is the same in every case: nobody there chose to be observed, several of them are having the worst week of their year, and an undergraduate exercise is not a good enough reason.

Permitted. Laundromats. Bus and train platforms. Supermarket queues. Public library reading rooms. Council pool foyers. Airport gates. Ferry terminals.

No notes in the room, and no photographs at all. In week 5 you wrote up outside because you were a participant. Here you write up outside because a person visibly recording strangers in a room they cannot leave is doing something different from research. Sit, wait, leave, write within fifteen minutes.

Fix your three rules before you go. What counts as mingling, what counts as observing, what counts as lingering. Write the rules down first — week 2 taught you what happens to a rule invented mid-count.

Then count, for one hour. How many people, in which category, and how the proportions shift as the room fills and empties.

If someone asks what you are doing, tell them. You are a student, this is a course about public places, you are counting how people use the room, you have written nothing about them individually, and you will leave if they would prefer. Then leave if they would prefer. Have that sentence ready before you walk in — if you would be embarrassed to say it out loud in the room, you have chosen the wrong room.