The Problem

Our team’s goal was to better understand what valet service meant to the different stakeholders involved in the process and practice of valet. After exploratory visits to the field, we narrowed our research focus to two main topics: safety and organization.

• How do cars and people move through valet spaces, and what does moving through those spaces mean to them?

• How do the valet workers understand the organization of valet service and spaces, and how is that the same or different from how the people who use valet imagine these things?

• How is value created for different actors in the practice of valet, and how does valet fit into a larger system of care?

Our team of four researchers completed this project over 11 weeks.

My Role

I was a key contributor for this project, working with my team to establish the problem space, collect and analyze our data. I was the lead cinematographer, conceptualizing how video could capturing original video footage and editing together our final video deliverable.

Research Strategy

Defining the Problem

• Social media research

  • To identify key topics before going into the field, we reviewed the social media reviews of our intended sites - hotels in downtown San Jose. This gave us insight into what customers of valet service cared about.

  • These reviews fell into several large topics: safety of property, timeliness, service, and cost.

• Exploratory Site Visits

  • Our team conducted exploratory site visits to observe valet service at several potential downtown sites and conduct informal interviews to hear from valet workers how they thought about their work. These visits helped us select our final research sites and allowed us to begin to build rapport with valet workers.

• Literature Review

  • We read other research to inform our understanding of how people and material things negotiate public and private spaces. This reading included topics like care and transportation systems, and mobility.

Gathering Primary Data

• Semi-structured interviews

  • We interviewed valet workers, a valet supervisor, and a frequent valet customer.

  • Our interviews helped us obtain information on:

    • General background on interviewee’s work with valet/use of valet

    • How the interviewee situationally identifies his/her beliefs and attitudes about safety and organization

    • What the routine of valet service is from first contact to last

    • The techniques and technologies used by valet staff to ensure safety and organization

    • The perceived consequences of the use of techniques and technologies valets’ work with, and what values each user considers

    • Reflections on the future of valet services

• Informal Interviews

  • During our observations, we chatted with the valets during lulls in their work. This helped us understand how they thought about their use of and movement through space, both public and private, and what they thought was important in their valet services.

• Ethnographic observations

  • Our team spent over 40 hours observing valet service at two downtown San Jose hotels.

  • We watched for how valets, valet customers, ride share drivers, and pedestrians (or other hotel guests) interacted in the valet space, including looking for:

    • Intended & unintended convergences between street users

    • Movement of different street users (including valet drivers, non-valet drivers, rideshares, and pedestrians)

    • How valets’ managed the flow of people and traffic, including where cars stopped, where loading and unloading occurred, and how valets utilized public space (like sidewalks) along with private space (hotel driveway)

• Spatial mapping

  • To better visualize what we observed, we created spatial maps of our two research sites (we used this set of codes, developed ahead of time, to drive our spatial mapping)

Analyzing the Data

• Qualitative pattern analysis

  • Using our data, we identified several key areas in valet service by identifying reoccurring themes and grouping them into broad categories. These themes included:

    • Time (efficiency, convenience, time savings)

    • Personal property (safety of property and liability for damage to property)

    • Human bodies (safety of bodies and ways valets use their bodies in valet service)

    • Technologies used by valets to accomplish the preceding themes (software, tickets/paper tags, mental models of organized space, the valets’ bodies)

  • We also drew from our interview data to consider the future of valet services.

    • Futures that are disruptive to valet service worlds

    • Impacts of rideshare services

    • Changes to the customer experience

  • Finally, we considered how a potential future of autonomous vehicle fleets might perform ‘care at scale’

• Spatial mapping analysis

  • We considered the themes identified in our interview and observational data to consider how our spatial mapping might highlight some of these things.

    • Unintended convergences - When valet workers converged with other street users (non-valet drivers, rideshare drivers, pedestrians, etc.) in an unintended way.

      • These moments highlighted potentially unsafe moments - moments that could cause bodily harm or property damage. Interestingly, these moments occurred most frequently at the edges of the official valet spaces.

      • This showed how spots where public and private spaces met were potentially sites of a breakdown of safety, one of the most important parts of valet service to both the valets and customers.

    • Pedestrian movements - The ways pedestrians navigated the valet space, which included a portion of public sidewalk at both our sites.

      • Mapping pedestrian movements helped us see how people who are not in vehicles look for safe spaces. Pedestrians avoided much of the valet space within the driveways, but would freely use the sidewalk space. This was true even at the valet site that utilized the sidewalk as part of their valet driveway - often parking cars there and directing rideshares through that space.

      • Pedestrian movements helped us identify spaces they saw as safe, by asking what spots pedestrians used, where did the hurry, and what did they avoid?

    • Organization - Valets used both mental models of their space (assigning spots within the driveway as parking spaces) and the physical items in their spaces to organize their service in both public and private spaces.

      • One interesting deviation was in rideshare behavior. Although valets stuck quick closely to using the space as the described it to us, rideshares did not use the space the way valets told us they were supposed to. This including driving through the private valet space when they were not supposed to.

      • Each site had a different amount of space. Although the flow of valet service moved similarly through each site’s space, the space limitations at one site significantly increased the valets’ use of public sidewalk space.