Text Exploration
In this paper, the author examines the relationship between ethnography, scholarly texts that summarize HCI work, and the accepted manner in which these texts end with “implications for design.” He argues that ethnography offers a deep contribution of analytic thinking and theorizing, and the presence of an implications section is indicative of a larger misunderstanding of the value of ethnography, and a misuse of both the term and the methodology itself.
Ethnographic practices began within the discipline of anthropology, and then moved into the social sciences. The Chicago School was influential in positioning ethnographic approaches in aspects of regular life, with a focus on subcultures and outsider groups. HCI adopted these methods and ways of thinking into fields like CSCW, to better understand the social organization of computer-oriented work. Participatory Design also adopted ethnographic practices, as Scandinavian workers were involved in the “design process” of developing their own workplace rules and norms.
These methods then found their way more broadly into studies of human computer interaction, but the author notes that the field itself was less adopted than was the presence of the people who do ethnography: social scientists “found a positive reception for aspects of their work” within the CHI community. The community itself read ethnography as a way for researchers to collect and organize data, and then to report that data back to a technology team. This is a view of field practices as a step on the way towards design, but the author argues that this view “marginalizes or obscures the theoretical and analytic components of ethnographic analysis.” A focus on the activity of ethnography, and a misunderstanding of this activity as a gathering activity, ignores the critical and theorizing nature of the field.
Ethnographic data is not extracted from a context and then documented. It is generated in the encounter between the context and the researcher. The author quotes Diana Forsythe as explaining that “an ethnographer is not a tape recorder” and this view limits the role of the researcher to a simple instrument that can be deployed when necessary.
The author then looks more closely at the problem of tying ethnography to design. This connection implies that people will encounter technological change in exactly the way it was intended, and ignores the nature of technology as a concept parallel to “space, gender, family, time, animals, food, death, emotion, and everything else.” Technology and everyday experience are the same, and ethnography is a way of at least working to make sense of that experience. Ethnography is commonly leveraged in technology projects with a focus on moments or glimpses of technology use, but the author argues that it should instead be “used” to model understanding of social settings. It does not produce facts that can be translated into requirements; it is an analytic way of theorizing about relationships people have with the world around them.