Lab 3 - Grey Anatomy

 What are people wearing on campus?

Seattle has a reputation for being home to the poorly-dressed, to some, those who prefer to dress for utility rather than fashion. During the colder, rainy months, it’s a common sight to see a street flooded with people wearing functional outdoor apparel, and brand names are clearly something to be revered. In contrast to the city’s association with constant dull, gray skies, color is not always something to be avoided in a persons’ outfit, although one could say its’ incorporations are not the most tasteful. 

When our group decided on Red Square as our scene for this lab, we chose it with the goal in mind of investigating the color choices UW students made with their outfits. It is winter time, so we predicted a lot of black because when we looked around the classroom, the majority of students had black outerwear on. It was difficult to gather our pictures at consistent times over several days, but we managed to take 10 a day, at somewhat consistent intervals, for three days. When taking the pictures, we made sure to have most of the frame angled towards the ground in each image to control for other features like the sky and buildings. We wanted the images to contain only people and the ground. Our images were affected by our camera quality and whatever colors did appear were muted. The main colors observed were on the neutral side of things, we saw lots of blacks, browns, and greys. This made sense given what I know about Seattleites. People native to the area generally describe winter time as a season to survive to make it to the summertime. A lot of my friends from here simply cope with the fact that it is winter by hibernating indoors and the negative feelings they have about the winter seem to translate into the colors they put on in the morning.

After processing the images, they seemed to be entirely in greyscale so we were worried about the infographic, but it turned out to have some color variation. My group chose to make a bar chart with the timestamps on the y-axis and percentages on the x-axis. We felt that it best visually represented the color distribution. I think during our data collection there were other variables we should have controlled for, such as time of day, that could have affected the resulting colors, but even still the chart sort of came out as expected with the colors on the darker end of the range. 

Our group worked very well together this time around. We had a better idea of what we wanted our topic to be earlier on and also I think we had a clearer understanding of what was expected of us, so we were able to game plan a good work schedule in a timely manner. The data collection process was one part of the project we could have done better, perhaps if only one person had taken the pictures, we could have been more consistent with the scene, time of day, and picture quality. Red Square was a bit of a difficult location because it was out of the way for those of us who did not go to campus daily, so we had to take as many pictures as possible in one session. Next time around, it would be a good idea to spend extra time on the data collection part of the project.