Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author explores the value of ethnographic work in the context of technology and design. He describes that the value of ethnography in the context of design lies not in a practical list of requirements for a specific product or design, but instead in the development of and presentation of analytic theory that can guide discussion of the appropriateness and contextual placement of an idea.

Published work typically describe a methodology, and the author argues that the word is misused. Methodology typically references methods and approaches and techniques, but should instead be viewed as a set of commitments to a position on the relationship between technologies, contexts, people, and practices. This is problematic when methodology is used specifically in context of an ethnographic practice—when it is used to describe ideas borrowed from the world of social science (or from any other adjacent field or discipline). The methodology of ethnographic inquiry is relevant for design, but not as a way of generating a set of requirements or bullet points, and “if the ethnographer returns from the field with little more than the lesson that the object in question should be green… there isn’t much to the ethnography.”

The author then represents what the methodology of ethnography actually is valuable for: producing “detailed and rich accounts of aspects of human experience… to present implications for design in the form of consequential, profound, and direct guidance for how to think about the issues in question.” They open the design space rather than close it, and the implications they provide are generated by the analytic aspects of the work, not the empirical work. These are broad framings that have longer-term impacts than a simple set of requirements, or a simple investigation, and implications for design that follow from ethnography should be viewed as conceptual and imaginative.

The best way to engage with ethnographic research is to “’read for theory’ as much as for empirical evidence, since these may, in the end, be where the truly significant implications lie.”

This is a follow-up to Implications for Design

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Reinforces the emergent parallel I am drawing between design strategy development and theory development
• Presents a view of what will be lasting after craft-based design is fully commoditized