I thought it would be wise if we were to do our piece in the café then I would need to gain further understanding as to why people decide to visit cafes. After I started to pay more attention at The Collection, I began to notice how people seem to be in their own little bubble and didn’t pay much attention to their surroundings or the people around them. It made me begin to question things such as;
Do people choose to visit cafes for the coffee, the atmosphere, or for the company they keep?
It seems that all these things merged together create an experience that makes people want to come back time and time again. People tend to visit cafes for different reasons, for some people it could be for a catch up with friends, others just to get away from their everyday life. For a lot of people it was another place to sit and do work. They go to do their work their because from personal experience the work load doesn’t seem so much when it is taken out of its normal surroundings, often a café is described as being a third place in a person’s life other than work and home.
Neeti Gupta has a theory that when we are alone in a public place, we have a fear of ‘having no purpose’ ((References:
Gupta, N 2004,’Grande Wi-Fi:Understanding what Wi-Fi users are doing in coffee-shops’. New Delhi, India, School of Planning and Architecture)). If we are in a public place and it looks like we have no business there, it may not seem socially appropriate. In contrast to this it is also suggested that ‘today’s coffee houses are less political settings than refuges from the stress of everyday life, where people can meet and talk, read, listen to music or poetry or simply watch the world go by’ ((Humboldt Bay Coffee Company, 2006 [Accessed: 24/02/2013] http://web.archive.org/web/20070915014128/http://www.humboldtcoffee.com/History.htm)). As these both give different perspectives it was decided that we needed to do research as to why people came and visited the café in The Collection to figure out who came to the café and for what purpose as I believe that our performance should be based around what we figure out through researching so we can gain a better understanding of the space.
Why do you choose to visit a cafe?