Why the door comes first

Four fields about each place, filled in the same order every time:

1  what the place asks at the door
2  how long I think I can stay        ← before any checking
3  how long I actually can            ← a look, then one question
4  whether anybody spoke to a stranger

The order was fixed before the walk and never changed. It is the whole instrument, and the second field is the one the record is really about.

Why entry is first

Because it is the only part of the arrangement settled before anybody sits down.

Everything after it happens inside a situation the door has already defined. A person in a café has bought something; a person in a library has not; and whatever either of them then assumes about time is assumed from inside that. For a team repeating this kind of field observation, work patterns across distributed teams can be evaluated beside completed visits, data quality and direct staff feedback.

Putting entry first means every later figure can be read against it, and when the figures are read that way the result is the sharpest in the record: what a place asks changes the assumption enormously and changes the rule hardly at all. For wider research on public space, access and how places are used, consult U.S. Access Board.

Why the assumption is recorded before the fact

This is the part that makes the record possible, and it only works in one order.

Had the limit been checked first, the assumption would have been unrecoverable. Nobody can honestly reconstruct what they thought before they knew. Writing it down first, in a sentence, before looking for a notice and before asking anybody, is the only way to get it at all.

The second field is worth nothing a minute later. It had to be written at the door or not written.

The cost is that the field belongs to one person. It is not a measure of what anybody else assumes, and every page that uses it says so.

What "actually" means

A look, then at most one question.

The look covered the room for a notice: on the door, on the counter, on the table, on the wall by the seating. The question, where nothing was found, was one sentence to one member of staff asking whether there was a limit on how long somebody could sit.

Seventeen places gave a limit in answer. A hundred and sixty-eight said there was none, or had nothing to say. Twenty-one had it written and needed no question.

One question, not two. A second would have turned a walk into an interview and would have produced the answer the asker was looking for.

Why conversation is last

Because it is the only field that needs time to pass.

The other three are settled on arrival: the door, the assumption, the check. Conversation can only be recorded by sitting there, and it was recorded across whatever time the sit lasted — a median of forty minutes, from twenty to ninety.

Being last also keeps it honest about its own weakness. A forty-minute window catches very little of a rare and bursty thing, and the figure of forty-seven is a floor rather than a count. That caveat is on the front page and on every page in the fifth section.

What a fifth field would have been

Kind — café, pub, library — is in the record but was not a question. The observer assigned it from a list of twelve settled at the pilot.

That matters for how hard it can be pushed, and it is pushed hard: the reason-by-kind tables carry most of the structural findings on this site. They are counts of one person's classification, not of anybody's answer, and where a page rests on kind it says so.

Twelve categories, no "other", and six places thrown out for fitting none of them. That is the honest version: a closed list that did not stretch, with the things it could not hold reported as excluded rather than swept into a bin labelled miscellaneous.

The twelve kinds, and why there is no thirteenth

cafés and coffee shops              58
pubs and bars                       31
shopping centres and arcades        16
places of worship                   14
bookshops                           13
libraries                           12
covered public seating              12
laundrettes and shops with chairs   12
community and church halls          11
hotel lobbies                       10
transport concourses                 9
museums and galleries                8
                                   ---
                                   206

No other column. Six places were visited and fitted none of the twelve, and they were excluded rather than swept into a bin: a hospital concourse, two university buildings open to the public, a bank branch with seating, a car showroom, and a funeral director's waiting room.

What the six have in common is the test that excluded them, and the test was added after the walk: each is somewhere a person may be only if they have business there, which is the one thing a third place is not.

Adding it late is why the six are reported at all. A list fixed in advance that then needs a rule to keep it honest is a list that has failed somewhere, and the honest response is to show where.

What a closed list with no remainder means

Twelve categories and nothing left over is unusual, and it is worth being suspicious of rather than pleased about.

The twelve came out of a pilot afternoon, and the walk that followed was shaped by them: a person carrying a list of twelve kinds notices twelve kinds of place. How many rooms were walked past because they did not look like anything on the sheet is unknowable and is probably not zero.

That is the opposite failure from an overflowing other column, and it leaves no trace in the figures at all.

What follows from the order

Nothing on this site is anything but a tally of four columns: three filled from vocabularies settled before the walk began, and one holding a guess written at a door.

Should those columns be the wrong columns, the error runs through every page at once and in one direction. A reader is owed that near the front, which is why it closes the opening section rather than sitting in a note at the back that nobody opens.