Full Circle Associates

Let's talk: introductory remarks for the theory section
Rick E. Robinson, Ph.D.
Global Director, GfK-NOP

Live blogging disclaimer: I can't fully capture it all and I make a ton of typos. I'll try and come in later and clean it up.

Rick Robinson, NOP World He– has been in the field a long time. He'’s founded the group eLab, which became the exemplar applyinging ethnographic work in industry. Now at GJK NOP worldwide. Forthcoming book dealing with ethnographic praxis in everyday life as it applies to industry.

Very conversation has a beginning, a first voice that says "I am Here"” and imagine the interlocutorcutors. Here becomes a place. A theory paper is one of those places, situating voices and beginning a conversation.

It is one thing to start a conversation with friends and families. You know the gambits toand yourndyour ability to return is assumed. It is another thing to walk into featureless dark and to speak and say I'm here and not knowing whrespondrepsond. Requires faith, fortituvisionisiotin. The conversation we start here today . I ddoubtbt I've even been in a room with quite so many people who’'s mothers don'’t know what they do. With all the alphabet soup, I don'’t think there has been a presentation on theor in the EPIC. Like to take a few minutes to abuse the metaphor of conversation further. If these are the first few papers that say "I am here"
and a few suggestions that come to mind.

Where's here?
It would be unlikely that anyone here would have difficulty defining the disciplines and traditions in which they were trained. Where they work is interdisciplinary. Technology and anthropolgy, computers and ethnography, and knowingly engaged in the definition of a new hybrid field. Like the emergence of molecular biology. That consensual domain formation through the integration and regrounding of disparate practices working on common problems. That doesn'’t apply.

Terms like "“applied anthropology" or "“user studies" don't have the gravitas of other things. A particular approach to a particular setting. Like saying Howard Becker is a cultural interviewer.

There is a space here. It is hard to be heterodox when your doxa is elswehere. We borrow. Work is treated like a field site. Industry is just th epalce where theory is tried out, but not what theory IS about. Theory dropped in from above, getting close, but never putting a foot down. Theory debate, must engage the conversations here, work in this set of gaps. Articulate the space itself which pecularly affect the development of theory. Theory cannot be the frame around the executgion of research when grounded amongst the underpinnings of other domains. Need abody of work in whixh to frame them.

Does the fact that we are doing research on women’s body deoderant mean we cannot acknowledgee we have done it before.

Not a particular definition of what counts as theory. We bring that from our differnet roots. Building a theory is along arc of conversation . Perhaps not so much abot locating, but engaging ourselve where we are now. Baba Ram Dass – Be here now?

Who else is in this conversation?
Practioners;
One of the opporutnities/challenges for theori in this space is there are a lot of parties wating to have this conversation. The number and kinds of backgrounds is amazing. So many of the people began self introductions with “I used to do, but then I” or “I was trained as, but now do.” Multi and interdicciplarny training is assumed. With the respective disciplines from which we emerged. No single dominant voice, butg a nacent community.
Participants: Can’t take them for granted. Many of the epxectations come from the pracxtixes of marketing and marketing research. When someone is a respondent you can end the dialog when you walk out the door and proceed on the fiction that we know them. Run the risk of confusing interrogation for conversation.

Other interested theorists; Stafford Beers 1967 “Decision and Control” – Beers’ dated work, management cybernetics, has a gem that transcends the original context. (IMAGE) Part of the work of theory is to move from cases to consensus, from particulars to generalizations. A reconciliation and testing of explanatory frameworks and models against wha twe see in the world. There is more than one model involved in that procxess. In Applied work we don’t just reconcile our conecptual models, but reconcile the models we build with the insitutions on whose behalf we are doing the investigation.

Instead of management scienc, Beers could have been talking about reconciling a medical model with a patient’s model. That is a nice readjustment of our thinking. On another hand, the notion that the second model of a situation, belonged not to the managers on the shop floor but to the mgmt theorists, from biz school, whose theoretical models had guided the design of the systems he was studying. Bringing two different models together to create a scietnfitic model. The same move we need to move from indisyncratic cases to a model to be useful to the client. The Relationship is between researcher, subject and client, each of whom brings a framework. Clients and client’s frameworks, and which some talk to reluctantly. We study users without hesitations, safe, comfortable and expected. Bugty the value of our work will be judged by the uses of them by the client. Matching the model we make with their model, engaging them in conversation, so rigours formulation, useful, accurate. One of the defining charactarists of this domain.

To do theory in a space you must recognie the actors. That includes clients. There are strings attached. Our work must be effective in a real sense of the word. If we move from analysis to this form of reconciliation of models, a more sustainable way of being here now instead of the vaguely threatening notion of corporate vested interest. Know what clients do with our studies, understand what effectiveness means in an org and to engage with them as much as those we study on their behalf.

3. Why thory matters, especially here.
Metphor flogging. Through the process of analogizing, reforming and testing, all of the models change. Basic conceptions about how things work and what matters – the idea that we are looking to change how our interlocutors are thinking… missed stuff.

Way of talking about design research, Rixhard Buchanan, Design as Inquiry: The Common, Future and Current Ground of Design. At each of its intersection the needs of design research are different.

The vertical axis is clear – what is driving the inquiry. Theory, Practixe, Production. Were we to lay out al the papers oabout ethnography in idustry, the results would not be top heavy on the theory side. The horizontal axis of scope of inquiry presents a different question. Criticism and Creation, Clinical, Applied, Basic. A single case study can be powerful, but a theory cannot be built upon it. It is a limited scope of inquiry. Little reach beyond the immediate for theory to make sense of.

The single most important thing is the Z axis: Future (theory) Present (Criticism and Creation ) Past (History). In this space, the here we are trying to articxulate is that theory of the fugture impacts or conditions the furture. This is in fact, action. We are in this conversastion with the people and orgs who will populate the future with artifacts, tools, ways of thinking. We are actively shaping the future, not just observers. Where there is engagement ehere is power and responsibility. When were we asked to summarize the history of a project without the implicit judgement of changing it. We act at this intersextion in a way that inflects companies who shape power and poitics. We have influenece on the fugture and responsibility for using it. If we only think of theory as the thing we learned in grad school, we miss an important possibility. If we think of theory as only something in research instiatution, we are abdicating power.

One formative line of text made it the perfecxt epigrammatix conclusionof the talk. Edge of anger, optimistic commitment.
“I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” – Patti Smith Easter/ Babelogue, 1978

Praxis rather than Practice – an important small change. Practice is a good thing. But the simplest translation of praxis is meaningful action.

Categories: EPIC2005