The self-narrated walk. A user-led method to research people’s experiences in urban landscapes

Abstract

Walking interviews and mobile ways of engaging participants in research have recently begun to emerge as methods to collect data that tries to understand people’s relationships with places. This work explores the self-narrated walk as a method to research people’s encounters and interactions with the landscape and their associated meanings and values. We address the method by explaining and examining how it has been designed, implemented and experienced by participants who engaged in a set of environmental immersive encounters in urban green landscapes. The findings show that this approach offers the user perspective, and facilitates in situ, mobile and in-the-moment, detailed, complex personal descriptions, and meanings into the mechanisms behind physical and emotional person–place interactions. Additionally, they suggest that the method is excellent to empower participants, to stimulate engagement with places and to capture simultaneously different data-sets. Finally, we discuss potential implications for landscape research and for the design process.

Keywords:

• Walking and talking
• user experience
• person–place interactions
• green spaces
• mobile methods
• narratives
• GPS data