The `adequate' design of ethnographic outputs for practice: some explorations of the characteristics of design resources (original) (raw)
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The recent Cox Review highlighted the issue that many more of our product design graduates should possess experiences and skills in, or at least have empathy with, techniques and methods from other areas [1]. With this in mind, this paper presents a series of projects concerned with the role of anthropological techniques and approaches in product design and development. In particular, the anthropological method of ethnography has been used here to support the creative process in the discovery of cultural patterns and subsequently developing products to meet or address those patterns [2]. In this way, ethnography can be viewed as a front-end design research method to investigate everyday social life and culture as a tool for promoting and developing innovation and creativity. This paper presents a brief overview of how ethnography has influenced product development over the last two decades and will show some of the future opportunities where ethnography can influence the design of products and the organisation of design processes. Specifically, the paper will describe recent case studies where ethnography has been used in engineering and product design education within Napier University’s MDes Interdisciplinary Design programme and across a range of undergraduate programs within the University of Strathclyde’s DMEM department. The authors will report on the contrasting styles of both institutions and attempt to draw out best practice to show how emerging ethnographic methods can inform new perspectives in product design education.
Ethnography, communication and support for design
Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design, 2000
This paper reflects on our experiences in supporting communication between fieldworkers and the designers of cooperative systems. We have investigated the nature of this communication by using a tool orginally designed to support the representation of software designs to present emerging results of ethnographic material. In this paper we discuss the tool used (the DNP) and the experiences of using the toolkit in the context of design. Our particular focus is on the use of the tool to represents results from a study of a UK financial institution where a series of prototyping exercises was underway.
Design Ethnography? Towards a Designerly Approach to Field Research
Empowering Users through Design Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services, 2015
A few decades ago, a transfer of ethnographic approaches to design and design research started to appear. It generally aimed at helping designers to understand people, their culture, and their usage of technologies in order to design better products. Over the years, designers in their work have repurposed a large array of theoretical concepts, methods and tricks. This chapter reflects on this evolution, and describes the notion of “design ethnography” in order to highlight the specificity of this approach. A project that speculates on the future of gestural interactions with technologies exemplifies this approach.
Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems processes, practices, methods, and techniques - DIS '97, 1997
Despite the growing number of ethnographic studies of work their use in design remains a matter of some debate.
Using Ethnography in Contextual Design
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 7, July, pp. 82-88., 1997
Ethnography originates from anthropology where anthropologists spend extended periods of time with primitive societies making detailed observations of their practices. In a design context the aim of ethnography is to develop a thorough understanding of current work practices as a basis for the design of computer support. A major point in ethnographically inspired approaches is that work is a socially organized activity where the actual behavior differs from how it is described by those who do it. This implies that detailed studies of work must include observations as well as interviews [for example 1, 4, 12]. Blomberg et al. [1] characterize ethnography with four principles and three main techniques: it takes place in natural settings; it is based on the principle of holism, that is, particular behaviors must be understood in the respective context; it develops descriptive understanding in contrast to prescriptive; it is grounded in a member's point-of-view. They use as main techniques observation, interview, and video analyses. Using ethnography in the design of computer based systems has become increasingly prominent especially within the research communities of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), but also within Participatory Design (PD), and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Plowman et al. [9] have recently reviewed all studies using ethnography published within the CSCW literature. In this review, three issues (of particular concern to us) are raised. First, the dominant approach is sociologists conducting the ethnographic studies and informing computer scientists of their findings, such as in debriefing meetings [for example 5, 6]. Second, reports on concrete consequences of a specific design due to such an approach are typically absent. Third, a "need to consider developing hybrid and tailored forms of ethnography which can play different practical roles in the various phases of design" is argued [9 p. 321]. As computer scientists, we have adopted and experimented with ethnography in design [2, 10, 11]. We have developed a method for participatory design where ethnography is an embedded part of the overall design activities [8]. Participatory Design refers to an approach where users play an active part. Users and designers engage in mutual learning activities in order to understand users' current work and generate coherent visions for change [3]. We believe that practitioners can benefit from using ethnography in contextual design (particular when designing systems in a specific organizational context), but they must be aware of the conditions needed for such an approach. This article presents a case from our research in the form of a design project for the Editorial Board of a Film Board (detailed in [10]). The project was conducted in two parts. Traditional techniques like meetings, interviews, document analysis, rich pictures, and mock-ups were used in Part One leading to a first design proposal. In Part Two, experiments with ethno-graphic techniques like observation and videorecording were applied and the effect was evaluated in light of the first design proposal. Here, we present the organization and describe the Editorial Board design project. We spent approximately 14 person weeks over a period of 10 months on the project because it also served as a research project. Had it been a real life consulting job, our estimate would be approximately 10 person weeks.
Fueling the ethnographic imagination by design
… Creative approaches to innovation in emerging …, 2004
contextual invention, innovation, ethnographic, user studies, design research, India, design ethnography, anthropology, culture Contextual invention is defined as the process of using ethnographic data to generate new technology and business ideas in an interdisciplinary team. Ethnographic imagination is described as the essential ingredient within this process. An ethnographic study of media use in India is used as an example of how to collect and use ethnographic findings imaginatively. Techniques used in the study include the collection of inspirational materials, the explicit discussion of new product concepts, the feedforward of new concept ideas, and the circulation of user need and concept sheets. The paper concludes with some lessons for design ethnography and its role in invention.
Putting ethnography to work: the case for a cognitive ethnography of design
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2000
The methods of ethnography and cognitive psychology are frequently set in opposition to each other. Whilst such a view may be appropriate in defining pure, or prototypical, classes of each activity, the value and necessity of such a distinction is broken down when researchers are goal-directed to study complex work domains in order to foster technological change. In this paper, we outline a rapprochement of these methods, which we term cognitive ethnography. The value of qualifying ethnography in this way is to emphasise systematically the differences between ethnography as a radial category and the kinds of legitimate method used to study work practices which are often referred to as ethnographic, but which in practice differ in important ways from prototypical ethnographic studies. Features of cognitive ethnography such as observational specificity, verifiability and purposivenes challenge many of the tenets of a pure ethnographic method, yet they are essential for studies that are undertaken to inform technological change. We illustrate our arguments with reference to a project to develop a tool for supporting design re-use in innovative design environments.
Ethnography: positioning ethnography within Participatory Design
Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, 2012
This chapter explores the history of ethnography in Participatory Design, the varied approaches that have been developed to connect ethnography and cooperative design, and the association this part ...
Beyond Design Ethnography : How Designers Practice Ethnographic Research
PREFACE 4 FOREWORD 7 USERS IN DESIGN 11 DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY? 29 FIELD RESEARCH & DESIGN 45 PERSONAL STANCES 69 CASE STUDIES 83 CONCLUSION 117 APPROACH 120 LEXICON 123 BIBLIOGRAPHY 128 3 BEYOND DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY HEAD -Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design) is proud to present its publication Beyond Design Ethnography: How Designers Practice Ethnography Research edited by Nicolas Nova, Professor within the Masters program in Media Design. Although discourse on the origins of design varies according to the different historiographical approaches, it is clear that for several decades now the design research community has been gradually setting out its own markers in the establishment of a scientific discipline. Through stimulating dynamics that combine interdisciplinary approaches and design's constituent elements to develop disciplinary legitimacy, this book represents a new milestone in the short history of design. Starting with the concept of ethnography in its postcolonial sense, it proposes a holistic approach to the added value of that which could be called "ethnographic praxeology" in design. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Nicolas Nova and to the authors for the complex intermixing of fieldwork, theoretical reflection and graphic representation of all this combined knowledge. Our thanks go to the research team, comprising Lysianne visiting lecturers at the University. Our gratitude also extends to Fabienne Kilchör, a member of the research team, and to Sébastien Fasel, both former students at the University and now regular contributors, for their remarkable graphic design work and data visualization.
Ethnography research for Design
2010
The following paper presents a research aimed at applying ethnographic observation to support co-design processes and evaluating how such data collected by experts can be efficiently communicated to designers. To this purpose we have developed our own set of tools and experimented them in 4 workshops in the framework of a project called Babylandia