Full Circle Associates

Dave Randall, Richard Harper, Mark Rouncefield
Fieldwork and Ethnography in Design: the state of play from the CSCW perspectives
I’m going to slow down a bit. We’ve been rushing. Rushing in the sense that maybe people want to bind us, to be alike, into a certain sort of thing called EPIC. A view about ethnography that is agreed. What we find in practice is that some claim to have a vision that equates with their vision of what ethnography. Through discussion and opening up possibility, it ends up being their view. The problem for me, David and Mark – in our fate and our experience, we’re confronted with a world where people disagree with us, where other people do ethnography in other ways and they are right to do so. For me, the problem for us is that, as Nina said, the term ethnography is a boundary object used by different people to do different work. Going to sketch some different ways that people do this

Anthropologists have no monopoly on ethnography
As you look back over the last 20 years, ethnographic practice has become a bundle of different things, some nascent. CSCW has, at worst, a kind of disciplinary … at times we doubt it. From that position it might contribute a kind of choose, possibility of arguments that can infuse what we talk about.
We want to anchor ourselves. This is where I come from. This is how I think about things and the merits of what I do. And those merits can’t be measured by ethnography in other practices and disciplines. We have to grow up and deal with the fact that if corporate life has funded ethnography, the it has become a hybrid. Certain parts of the hybrid can’t effectively understand other parts.

Quick History of CSCW – 25 years old. I must stand here as if I can say something about it. Term coined many years ago on a whim. The idea that you should move away from the cognitive, away from the idea that humanity can be conceived as a computer. Marxists who turned coat on their old disciplines to look at how work occurs naturally. Fieldwork accrued the name ethnography. Seems to offer naturalist description, scenic offering. It came to be ethnomethodlogy. We thought it was the way forward. A view. A methodology to design better work systems.

So CSCW today. Everyone uses the word ethnography. Become many sorts of things. Who owns the term. Sometimes it is a method to correct other methods. Ethnography instead of focus groups. Sometimes it is a critical tradition, as in anthropology.

Current texts we could refer to from different disciplines. Vicente, example of the need to ground ourselves and dispense with some of our vanity. Vincent says do ethnography to understand contest, local skills, artifacts and ecologies. You need to build and apply theory. Sound familiar?
In human factors, not where we expected.

What about our own experience. How do we managed to assemble a sense of place with people with disparate views, people thinking that they are the only people talking about those things.

What about our own experience. Is there any body politic we can measure, learn from? Seminal study in CSCW with air traffic control. The study fit the ethnomethodology of place, fit the tools, worked because it was a clear design problem. Canonical in part because it was a perfect fit. Specifiable domain, sets of skills, ways of measuring benefits, etc.

Research on change in banking. Comparative with different sets of problems, process, places. Some of the places were virtual. Part of the problem was to convey understanding across different situation.; Was it a success apparently.

Inside the “smart house.” What might it feel like. Here smart homes, interested in the future of technologies in the home. Smart homes a dish everyone is working on. IN this project, the client did not want us to have conclusions, but lines of possibilities. Lines of insight. You can mean a lot to build a smart home, a lot from living in a home.

Lessons?
Lots of different topics
Lots of different data gathering
Lots of analytical tools and implications

If I claim a particular view, I can’t justify it in my own research experience. What do we learn from that complexity. When I started out I thought ethnomethodology was the only answer. But they are not uniquely sufficient. Issues of method are largely serendipitous, capricious. I learned there is not always a clear relationship between fieldwork and what design might be.

How do we move forward?
Although George Marcus writes as if anthro is everyone’s concern, he writes about the concerns of anthropology. IN his book, Through Thick and Thin, fieldwork is driven by a political analytic foci. Who defines them. If EPIC is exploring this interdisciplinary space, the problem might be you cant’ define fieldwork because you can’t define this. Maybe we can claim some analytic foci

He’s lost me now.

The foci are related to design, but design is a many-headed animal. Sometimes you have something in mind, something not. Host of different qu4estions about ethnography in design. Where you fit in the larger scheme of things. It is a broad, encompassing thing.

Is it anything goes? No. While what you do might seem vague, there are ways forward. There are a set of tropes and analytical themes that can be leveraged.

Follow the plan – investigate the documentation, the procedures, the body politic of CSCW. Appreciate the information life cycle, its birth, life and death.
Follow the job/trad/biz relationships
Follow the skills being deployed
Follow the knowledges
The use
The ecology
The troubles – false, starts, distractions
With these, compare settings skills, processes, and places.
Compare the present and the future
Otherness elsewhere in time and place.
Use those sorts of tropes, analytical themes to create a sensibility. Combine a design sensibility with an ethnographic imagination. That might not make for good anthropology or ethnography, but it does for good ethnography in design. Can’t compare it with good anthropology. Good anthropology design in CSCW don’t apply in anthropology.

When you bring people together from different perspectives it is important to know where people come from.. IN ethnographic practice there are a number of perspectives and sensibilities. Need to frankly discern what they are to make coming to conferences like this worthwhile.

Categories: EPIC2005