356 ANALYZING DATA
market and to look for a “matnas kind of building”—although in that moment I could not have
spelled out what that meant. I found the center in moments.
This observational experience—in particular, my diffuse sense that there indeed was such a
thing as a “matnas kind of building”—led me to the reflection, some days later, that the design
was, in fact, both distinctive and common to the matnassim (plural) I had seen in different locales.
Trying to make explicit to myself what that distinctiveness entailed led me to review the chairman’s
letters and to consider that his comments were not solely articulations of his personal aesthetic
sensibility and values, but rather that he was expressing the collective intent of the ICCC founders
to convey, through the design of the matnas spaces, certain collectively held values, beliefs, and
feelings. These “organizational” meanings, held by both board members and agency staff, com-
prised the agency’s internal identity and the image it desired to project externally; and they were
being expressed, in speech and writing as well as in built materials, to several different, very specific
publics, among them clients, other organizations (local, national, and international), and potential
donors (also local, national, and international). I learned subsequently through other sources that
these intended meanings were by and large being “read” (not always uncritically) by agency-relevant
publics near and far, including many would-be clients. Here, as I came much later to see, were
enacted both hermeneutic and phenomenological principles concerning the artifact-meaning rela-
tionship in the context of the organization’s life-world and its collective “Self.”
Some time after this site visit, I found articulated in letters written by other board members the
same relationship among specific design elements, underlying meanings, and intentional com-
munication to a broad spectrum of “readers” of these built spaces, confirming my provisional
interpretation. Two of these letters, in particular, linked these meanings to intended changes in
client behavior. Subsequent conversations (including formal interviews) with founding and later
board members, ICCC staff, staff of other agencies, local residents, more distant publics, and
others confirmed this desire and intent (as suggested by the epigraph taken from that analysis)
and indicated how these intended meanings were perceived and understood by others (Yanow
1996). All of this generated field notes for subsequent deskwork, when I began to make sense of
the observations, conversations, interactions, correspondence, and so forth in a more explicitly
analytic mode. It also corroborated my provisional sense making that organizational meanings
were being communicated through the buildings themselves. But how was this happening?ANALYZING SPACE DATA: SPACE AS NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIONSpace data (and other physical artifacts) may be elements in an ethnomethodological, symbolic-
interactionist, or some other interpretive analysis (see, e.g., Feldman 1995), or they may be the
exclusive concern of research seeking to establish the ways in which spatial elements communi-
cate contextually specific meaning (see, e.g., Goodsell 1988; Pader 1993, 1994b; Yanow 1993,
1998). I take the latter as my focus here.
Built spaces, as with other objects, may be literally mute, but they have their own vocabulary
or “language” (of building materials, size, scale, mass, color, shape, proximity to surroundings,
appurtenances, and other design elements) through which they articulate properties, identities,
values, and so on without recourse to words. Much in the way that humans communicate through
nonverbal means, built spaces (and other objects) communicate their artifactual meanings
nonverbally, through these design vocabularies. As experience and meaning making of built space
initially invoke bodily and affective responses rather than cognitive and linguistic ones, insights
and categories from research in nonverbal communication (such as those discussed below) are