Friday’s class was amazing to say the least. Everyone was a little bit miffed about what we would be doing once we read the post asking us to bring our toothbrushes and any tooth brushing equipment and all speculated as to what the purpose of this could be. Would it be speeding dating while brushing your teeth, so you could suss out bad behaviour in the tooth brushing department from your potential business partners?
It turned out to be a lot less dramatic but even more useful. We teamed up and had to take a partner to the bathroom, and interview them as they brushed their teeth to learn more about the oral hygiene.
I did feel weird as I brushed my teeth over and over again, and explain the choices I was making such as
- why did I make sure the water was cold before hand?
- why did the toothpaste have to be wet?
- how did I know i had brushed my teeth properly?
Through asking me these questions, my partner and I found out about the choices i was making that i didn’t think about because they had become routine. in summary we found that because the whole exercise of brushing my teeth was something that i had done for a very long time, it was all instinctive and based on what i had been taught by my parents or led to believe by the media- foam =good.
This foam = good idea we both questioned in order to see if there was any truth to it and found that this was not necessarily true as in the class discussion we learnt of the various cultural differences.
Taking this on board when i had the chance to play the interviewer, i challenged my partner as was sugguested to do something completely different. After watching her brush her teeth, top and then bottom, i decided to try a double toothbrush, one which would brush top and bottom simultaneously, and it worked. hence the bottom tooth brush was born, perfect for a busy modern life, it cuts the time we spend but not the care and quality, we spend brushing our teeth.
all in all the purpose of the experiment wasn’t to see people in weirdly awkward teeth brushing situations but to experience both the roles of interviewer and interviewee and from this experiment develop methods of analysing routine behaviour in order to come up with a new ways of doing things.
