Going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings, I ran across this interesting paper entitled “Ethnography as Design Provocation” by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off my explaining how the use of ethnography in technology development has been limited to data collection, which led to isolate the researchers from design (which is R.J. Anderson’s point) and a limit to the way practice and technology can evolve together (Paul Dourish’s point). The authors advocate for another approach in which ethnography can “provoke new perspectives in a design organisation”.

They describe this stance through case studies of “design encounters” (i.e. workshops) showing how ethnography could be “shared material”, “embodied in design” and a way to frame “user engagement”. The conclusion they draw are also interesting:

“ Firstly, to engage the potential of ethnography to provoke organisations to rethink their understandings of problems and solutions, the textual form may not be adequate. Neither are insight bullet points, as they submit to the logics of rational argumentation that hardly provokes questioning and engagement. Instead, we find it paramount to develop ways of engaging the organisation in sense-making through the use of visual and physical ethnographic material.

Secondly, the ethnographic theory building, though crucial to design, cannot progress independently of the prevailing conceptions of (work) practices ‘out there’ in the organisations – and these may not become clear to us until we confront the organisation with our material. Better sooner than later.

Thirdly, to move collaboration beyond requirements talk among the design team, organisation and participants, needs well-crafted ethnographic material to frame the encounters to focus on fundamental issues and perceptions.“

Why do I blog this? interesting reflections about methodologies, a good follow-up to this other post.

In “Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the “implications for design” issues he addressed at CHI2006 (see my notes here).

In the CHI paper, he argued how the use of ethnographic investigation in HCI is often partial since it underestimated, misstated, or misconstrued the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation. Which is problematic since researchers aims a deriving “implication for design” from these investigations. The DUX paper continues on that topic to show how ethnography is relevant but not in the bullet-point “short term requirements” way some use to think about. As he says, “the valuable material lies elsewhere” or “beyond the laundry list“, which is described through 2 case studies about emotion and mobility.

Then what should be these implications for design (voluntarily skipping the examples, see the paper pls)?

“The implications for design, though, are not of the “requirements capture” variety. They set constraints upon design, certainly, but not in terms of operationalizable parameters or specific design space
guidance. What they tend to do, in fact, is open up the design space rather than close it down, talking more to
the role of design and of technology than to its shape.
(…)
A second observation about the implications is that they are derived not from the empirical aspects of ethnographic work but from its analytic aspects. That is, the ethnographic engagement is not one that figures people as potential users of technology, and looks to uncover facts about them that might be useful to technologists (or to marketers). Instead, ethnographic engagements with topics, people, and fieldsites are used to understand phenomena of importance to design, and the implications arise out of the analysis of these materials.
(…)
the theoretical contributions that the studies provide have a considerably longer shelf life, and a relevance that
transcends particular technological moments.

Is it a cop-out to say that what these studies provide is a new framing for the questions rather than a specific set of design guidelines? Hardly.

In addition, his discussion about the responsibilities is also important:

“The engagement between ethnography and design must be just that – an engagement. Ethnography and
ethnographic results are part of that engagement.
(…)
I’d argue that it is no more the ethnographer’s responsibility to speak to design within the context of each specific publication than it is the designer’s responsibility to speak likewise to ethnography. Rather, the responsibility for ethnographically grounded design results is a collective one.

Why do I blog this? This is a topic Paul Dourish will address at LIFT08 in Geneva. Beyond that, this article echoes a lot with both reviews I received from academic papers (criticisms towards implications for design that are too broad and not short term requirements) and what can be observed from designers’ practices at the Media and Design Lab I joined 6 months ago.

Closer to my own research, I like the way he frames this notion of implication; and indeed ethnography can bring more than sort term recommendations as it can uncover motivations for action, needs and deeper human rationale. In my research about location-awareness, we explored the differences between self-disclosure of one’s location and automatic positioning; in this case, the crux issue was not to oppose the two sort of interfaces but rather, to show how each of them was different and had different implications in terms of human motivations (for example, self-disclosure of one’s location is linked to communication intentionality).

Dourish, P. 2007. Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing for the User Experience DUX 2007

Having a glance at this Thoughtless Acts book that was standing on a shelf in my apartment, I ran across the last part about why documenting such practices is relevant. The book is a collection of different snapshots which captures the ordinary actions people unconsciously perform every day, avoiding wet surface on the pavement, putting one’s coffee on a radiator, etc. So why is this important? Beyond the “such interactions can inspire design opportunities”

“Highlighting needs and problems worth solving: though: the world doesn’t need a unique design solutions for every creative adaptation we see (that’s the kind of stuff that ends up advertised in in-flight catalogs!). Rather we shiuld look for patterns of more universal needs.
(…)
Freeing us from existing paradigms through a focus on action: break through limitations imposed by existing solutions, force to focus on the actions that we are trying to solve through design
(…)
Revealing what is intuitive, helping us design appropriate cues: helps configure material elements and qualities into intuitively recognizable and understandable forms (affordaces). (…) observation can sharpen our awareness of how people respond to particular arrangements and elements.
(…)
Tuning us in the cultural patterns and meanings: observations help us become more sensitive to sociocultural habits and the meanings conveyed by particular design attributes.
(…)
Uncovering emotional experience
(…)
Harnessing tacit knowledge to inform the design process: by encouraging people to notice and document their habits, workarounds, unspoken rules, and cryptic signaling systems, we can work together to uncover the opportunities for improvements.
(…)
Inspiring more flexible and enduring solutions: many people nowadays are disenchanted by the obligation to design, produce, or purchase a plethora of short-lived, disposable, single-purpose, or single-use items and are interested in findings solutions that create more enduring values.“

Why do I blog this? an interesting description of how designers might turn qualitative appraisal of daily life as “insights”.

Ethnography and Design? by Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden is an insightful paper written in 2002 about the practical relationship between ethnography and design. The main problem they describe is how to link details accounts of situated activities (provided by ethnography) to the actual design of computer systems.

Beyond “requirements engineering”, the authors propose “a broader conception of design work” with three roles for ethnography:

“To identify general researchable topics for design through continued workplace study.
(…)
To develop abstract design concepts concretely by using workplace studies to sketch out and work up design-solutions. (…) Evaluations may be both summative, where ethnography is employed as a means of conducting a ‘sanity check’ on design, and formative, where prototyping sessions are treated as sites of work amenable to study and findings are used to drive iteration in design
(…)
To drive the development of novel technologies by evaluating the social application of innovative technological research. “

They also distinguish “product-oriented design” and a “process-oriented view”:

““The product-oriented perspective places an emphasis on organizing the design of an end-product rather than on the nature of the production process itself (…) An alternate point of view - the process-oriented view – places emphasis on the role of learning and dialogue between the parties to design throughout the development process employed as a means of conducting a ‘sanity check’ on design, and formative, where prototyping sessions are treated as sites of work amenable to study and findings are.”“

Why do I blog this? some good elements here to nurture methodological discussions and to go beyond current use of ethnography in design research.

Crabtree, A., Rodden, T. (2002). Ethnography and design? In Proceedings of the International Workshop on “Interpretive” Approaches to Information Systems and Computing Research. London. pp. 70-74.