Full Circle Associates

The proceedings for the conference can be found on the website http://www.epic2005.org, but I'm still flailing along taking notes as people read, rapid fire, their papers. Call me a fool... it is a good way to pay attention for me.

Jeanette Blomberg
The Coming of Age of Hybrids: Notes on Ethnographic Praxis

Feeling a serious identity crisis at this conference. Came to find our crowd, but there are so many different parts of my life represented in people here and they don’t fit together nicely. The trends and paths are represented, from early days at Xerox Parc to work at Sapient focused on building on the E-Lab experience, to involvement in the participatory design community, bringing workers into design, my friends in organizational or business anthropology are here as well. As we look at the EPIC conference, it is like that old story of the elephant when they grab on to a part to define what is an ethnographic praxis.

In the workshop many people talked about how different the other people were in groups, hard to connect with all the ideas and issues. SO a little personal identity crisis as I prepared my remarks. What audience am I speaking to?

Assignment was to put together some comments on the workshops (yesterday). Looked through the workshops, but didn’t attend any of them, but I read through the descriptions. It seemed that one way one might talk about these as a collection is to use the notion of hybrids. The descriptions were all asking relational question. Between the social and material, online and offline, global agendas and local problems, our spiritual selves and our secular workplaces. A way to describe the design and research on the identities we all have.

I went back and looked at the literature of hybrids. Critical studies – not me, not the field I work in. Donna Haraway “In so far as we know ourselves in both forma discourse and in daily practice we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras.”

What was interesting was the knowing that comes from the examination of daily practice. How dualisms loose their explanatory power in the complexity of everyday practice. These dualisms were made clear to me 20 years ago. My project was to understand Trillian, which was going to change interface design practices. My job was to help with the iteration of the design. The taken for granted categories of technical and social permeated the work. 2 different design groups took up trillian in different ways. The interface designers were writing machine executable code with Trillian in one group, not just to design. It could not be designed or known outside of the use. It became its materiality through its use. I did not have the language of hybrids. Our understandings arose from the interchange between material goods, human labor and social relations.

Defining the impact of physical spaces on social interactions workshop, how spaces shape the possibility of interaction. The flipside of the question, how do social interactions define the physical spaces we move through. Example: project rooms. Physical spaces defined by the practices of their participants. It wasn’t the physical spaces of the project room but the practices of people from their E-Lab experiences defined the space. (pictures of post its). There was another workshop on the sociality of objects. Material objects are conceptualized as full-fledged actors.

Another dualism: Virtual – Real: The meeting. The workshop took up the question on how might we design our ethnographic work that can move between the physical offline and virtual online. How do we conceptualize the differences between the spaces. The digital receptionist, the pediatrician examining a patient through an online connection. But there are more mundane examples. One I live with daily, and part of a research project. On any given day what you might find is a group of folks who might convene a meeting. Ubiquitous and organizing principle of the work. You might find people in Manhattan dialed in with people on trains, in home, in other countries, supported with NetMeeting, email, documents emailed out. How do we define the physical space. The pure categories of online and offline in even a mundane situation.

Local – Global dualism. The global reach of Western capitalism. Business ethnography from the bottom of the pyramid. Examine the importance of calling attention to the everyday practices of those caught up in the web of relationships. Powerful companies impact human labor, but often rendered invisible in value calculators. It calls, one of the real values, real focus on the context in which humans and capital come together.

Finally, the relationship between the Spiritual and Secular. The topic concerns how the spiritual constructs ourselves in the workplace and why a religion is such a taboo of ethnographic research. In our early learning we learned that “primitive” cultures did not separate the religious from the secular. We have learned this is not “primitive” but the secular still dominate our frameworks. To advocate a hybrid is not without risks. There are management books that talk about spirituality guiding the workplace and books talk about its benefits. Living in Silicon Valley, in our papers, the Dali Lama is frequently sited at powerful digerati gatherings.

The point is that hybridity must be examined and understood in the particular context. (See also her written remarks in proceedings) Hybridity can apply to our subjects and ourselves.

What ethnographic practice points to the every day challenge of the concreteness of all these dualisms. Celebrate our commitment to the ephemeral, ordinarily situated ness of our everyday practice.

Brief Workshop Summaries:
Doing Business with the Bottom of the Pyramid – the main theme was how do you synthesize social responsibility with doing business with the bottom of the pyramid. Devote expenses of understanding these group, there has to be value. How do you convince companies to see the value and appeal to social responsibility. There was a cement company that helped BOP people constructing home. They had to change their way of doing business. They gave money, advice, and helped people build home and the company made profit. Radical change of doing business. Another interesting idea was suppose there was social responsibility welded to profit.

Studying Distributed Sociality: online and offline research – Lively discussion, we could not close them up and the evaluations, it was successful. We gave some background, then had people distributed in three tables and asked them to get to know each other. We had provocative slogans on the wall (How do you get informed consent from an avatar) then had small and whole group discussions. What is happening to participant observation in cyberspace. There were some who requested take aways, references, including on basic nuts and bolts ethnographic work. Send email to get that from Brigitte

Joe Fish – Holy Hanging Out – You have to justify yourself about why you should talk about religion. 2 billion Christians, (he rattled out more figures). From a corporate point of view that is a market, works in ways we are not used to as markets. The boundaries between cultural and religious practices are pretty thin. Need to understand the religious side. We realized we need tools and techniques to study and communicate to our colleagues. Have public conversations about this. Religion transcends any particular god, about culture, an organizing principle for doing business – deep talk. It’s a huge business opportunity. To miss out on this is an enormous problem. Either you can understand and do something with. If not you may become irrelevant because of the key role this plays in the rest of the world

Collaboration Across Distances: The focus was to take up the question of collaboration – how can we do better, challenges, and to push at what does it mean and how should we reflect. The core revolved around a design game using video clips, in groups, review clips and quickly try to make sense of the work and pulling out themes in small groups. Then we had to choose from a map base that spoke to our view of what we had seen and then populate with the things we created. Then we broke out to say, if we start from a picture of executed research, backing up from that, how do we get there ? Challenges and problems of framing ethnographic research.

Defining the Impact of Physical Spaces and Social Interactions – Rick talked about the notion of being here and conversation. I felt like we were grounded in thinking about materiality and social interaction. The diversity of the people in the group, they place they come from, their locatedness, how we were able to think together, collaborative, broke into groups, talked about designing airplane cabins and kitchen spaces. Took away the strength of the thinking, the willingness to respond to an offered framework.

The Sociality of Field work:
We had a conversation, which spiraled, a little out of control we started with this issue of looking at impersonal connections. When we have heard people cry when we interview, starting up listening and ending up counseling, how do you explain to people in New Guinea about white people going to the moon, when truth is a different construct in working in other cultures, and recruiting people by dressing up as a hedgehog.

Object Sociality: Rethink how objects, how we should conceptualize objects as a part, and in terms of being social with them We looked at contemporary theories, the social life of things, Marxist traditions. We shared personal stories about objects. Rich and interesting personal objects starting from glasses to scarves, watches, memorabilia, bookcases. Although different, they all shared the thickness and richness, and different layers of meaning we had with the objects. Issues of timelines. Things change over time.

Working the Process: We focused on relationship between work process and sociality in the context of the changing workplace and global organizations. We presented some of our own work, had posters on the wall to spark discussion, and broke out into three groups to focus on discussion questions. WE found ourselves unpacking the concept of work process. What does it mean in various contexts. It always gets recontextualized and your methods need to be readjusted. Issues around crossing boundaries, many stakeholders. We came up with conclusion that the study of work process needs to be transdisciplinary and there need to be tropes or languages that cross discipline to share work and results.

Framing Ethnographic Praxis of innovation; co-developed ideas about what is the innovation space. We came up with a host of issues about our theories of innovation, the dialogic nature of innovation, who and how do people participate, what forms of engagement do we have as anthropologists, what are the context of creativity. Created a visual model to map out the space of looking at the production of innovation as a social process.

Categories: EPIC2005