Assignment 3: Design Safari

Our third assignment was all about people watching, or the technical term 'Ethnography'. For this I decided I wanted to go and visit the G Casino in Dundee, a place all of my friends had been but I had never got around to going. So with a couple of other girls in my course we went for lunch one afternoon, a monday afternoon to be exact. When we first went in we got chatting to the guy on reception, who sorted out our membership for us. He informed us that the casino was in fact not that busy but we went on in anyway. When entering the casino you have to go up a few floors after reception to get to the actual casino, and as interior students we immediately started noticing all the decor, interesting wallpaper made up of tiny images of Dundee which we were all quite impressed with, and a rather out dated carpet we were a little confused with, as the casino has only just recently opened. However we carried on, ordered some lunch (which was very good by the way) and started to observe. We noticed that the casino was a little bit deserted, and the whole are very separated, with very different people in each area. The table area seemed to have only men, all age 40 or over and looking mostly middle/upper class. They were all looking very serious and very in to their gambling, something i thought odd for it only being lunch time. When we were observing them (perhaps not very subtly) they looked a little shifty and uncomfortable. We also noticed that as there wasn't too many people everyone was sitting a seat apart. Some seemed on edge as well, fidgeting and looking quite nervous. On the other side of the casino at the slot machines there were older people, typical 'grannies' who would sit at the same machine with a drink with them. This side of the casino was a lot more relaxed, more fun i would guess rather than the seriousness of people at the tables. It surprised me there was such a lack of younger student types in, as from what I'd heard from friends the casino was the place to be! Maybe not during the day but I still expected a few.
We noticed from the way people were so separated that the casino layout was designed with very different zones, the bar, the restaurant, the roulette tables, the slots and a seating area with televisions. The betting table area was very literally separate, with a railing around the area and it was central to all of the other zones, most likely because it's the part they make the most money and want people to go to the most. The bar is very flashy and glamorous, bright lights attract your attention and expensive wine and champagne menus are laid out at every table. We got chatting to the barman and he told us that the flashy lights at the bar were a great way of spotting the drunks as they can be quite disorientating, although i'm not sure if this was a deliberate design decision, but if it was, it's a clever one!

Lights played a prominent part in the design of the casino, adding to the 'glitziness' and also subliminally guiding people through the room. The lights on the ceiling swooped across the room guiding you from the entrance through to each section. This is continued with flooring and with the glass panels surrounding the roulette area, all allowing any user to smoothly walk from one area to the next.

Adding to the whole casino experience even more is the atmosphere of the place. Calm music is played throughout the day and the place is a lot more soothing and relaxed than i expected. This may just be due to the fact that it was during the week I visited and that at the weekend it livens up. I would expect the atmosphere is calm deliberately, keeping users happy and relaxed enough to keep on playing. 

My experience in the casino was not at all what I expected. Having never been in any casino I expected something like in the movies in Las Vegas, it was not like this at all. I visited once in the afternoon and then later in the week at night and at night it wasn't all that more exciting. It wasn't fun and full of the glamour advertised in its leaflets and the way casino's are portrayed in Hollywood, just older business men losing their money.