“Ethnographic Encounters/Design Interventions”
Laura Forlano
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology
Introduction
Ethnographic encounters intervene in the everyday lives of ‘subjects,’ ‘informants’ and
users as well as non-human entities such as nature, animals and the environment. They
are also rich sites of knowledge production and exchange around nascent areas of inquiry.
Design interventions are more deliberately understood as such because they seek to
promote change in the world. But, neither kind of intervention is implicitly objective or
without politics. This essay bridges understandings around anthropological interventions
such as participant observation and qualitative interviews with design interventions such
as cultural probes, protoyping and codesign in order to speculate on the potential for new
research methodologies at the intersection of design and anthropology.
Over ten years ago, I sat behind a small metal desk in the office of a telecom think tank in
the Roppongi neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan for the better part of a typically muggy
summer. I dutifully arrived at the office daily (albeit in the mid-afternoon after I had been
to the gym and eaten a rack of cold soba noodles from Lawsons’ convenience store)
where I read early studies on the use of mobile phones. It was not until the end of the
summer that I realized that I was unlikely to learn much about this phenomenon, and its
role in the lives of Japanese teenagers, crouched in the air conditioned office. Instead, I
had to get myself the latest NTT DoCoMo smart phone (despite foreigners being
prohibited from signing up for them), get out onto the streets and start watching people’s
everyday interactions in public spaces. In short, I had to exist in the world that I was
studying.
As a graduate student with little exposure to ethnography, I thought that research was
something that happened in a university lab rather than out in the world. For the rest of
the summer, I failed to show up at the office. Instead, like a truant schoolgirl, I camped
outside the popular Hachiko exit of Shibuya station watching the friends reunite over and
Paper for the seminar "Interventionist Speculation", August 14-15, 2014, Aarhus, DK,
The Research Network for Design Anthropology.
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over again and navigated the Harajuku streets teaming with teenagers. This was a
seemingly brave act that seemed like breaking the rules of academia at the time but, in
fact, it underscored the importance of getting out into the field and intervening in the
world.
Ethnographic intervention took on a new meaning as I returned to the United States and
began research on Wi-Fi networks and emergent mobile work practices. In my
interviews, I reassured isolated café workers -- keenly aware of their non-standard work
schedules -- that there were others like them and, yes, in fact, I was interviewing 30 such
people. I met a homeless blogger that masqueraded as a businessman perched on a stool
at a Starbucks in mid-town; his identity concealed by his beige trench coat and laptop
computer. I debated nurture and nature over beers with a transsexual hacker who argued
that despite her biologically determined identity “she was a good person.” Yet, strange
notions about the need for objectivity in qualitative interviewing along with ill-suited
Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines that protected privacy and anonymity but
prevented doing anything more than questioning, listening, recording and analyzing these
exchanges.
Another kind of ethnographic intervention took the form of technological engagement
with my surroundings using spectrum analysis to observe patterns in the use of
electromagnetic spectrum. Spectrum analysis can be understood as a kind of trace
ethnography (Geiger & Ribes, 2011), an ethnographic encounter with a non-human
research subject. Ethnographic encounters with data, devices, infrastructures, other nonhuman things as well as animals and the natural world are also important sites of
intervention in the world.
This essay speculates on how things might have been different if I had approached my
field site as a design researcher rather than as a social scientist?
While social scientists study the importance of objects, artifacts and things (Ingold, 2010)
in mediating socio-technical processes, they do not typically engage in the generative act
Paper for the seminar "Interventionist Speculation", August 14-15, 2014, Aarhus, DK,
The Research Network for Design Anthropology.
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of creating new things for mediating their own interactions with their ‘informants’ or
field sites. For example, the social construction of technology (Pinch & Bijker, 1984),
boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and
object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2012) contribute to the ways in which social scientists
understand the affordances (W. W. Gaver, 1991; Norman, 1990) of things. However,
more recently, social scientists have become interested in inventive methods (Lury &
Wakeford, 2012), public ethnography (Gans, 2010) as well as the creation of artifacts
(Belman, Flanagan, Nissenbaum, & Diamond, 2011; Jungnickel, 2014), performances
(Orr, 2006; Watts, 2012), exhibits (Latour & Weibel, 2005; Townsend, Forlano, &
Simeti, 2011) and constituencies through workshops and events (Greenspan, Lindtner, &
Li, 2014; Loukissas, Forlano, Ribes, & Vertesi, 2013).
These approaches have been very much influenced by scholars at the intersection
between social science and design. Rather than using design merely as a way of
promoting scholarly research, these practice-based research methods use design as a way
of doing scholarly research, and, at the same time, reconfiguring the relationships
between the researcher and the researched. However, these approaches are still
considered to be very experimental and, even, controversial. For example, social
scientists are sometimes cautioned by their advisors not to mention their practice-based
research lest they appear to be unscholarly.
In contrast to traditional social science methods, design researchers have a range of
approaches that can transform an ethnographic intervention into one in which knowledge
about the world can be generated in situ through engagement of cultural probes (B.
Gaver, Dunne, & Pacenti, 1999) and prototypes (Galey & Ruecker, 2010) as well as
through the creation of codesign events and workshops that serve to create constituencies
and expose tensions around issues (Hillgren, Seravalli, & Emilson, 2011; Sanders, 2008).
With inspiration from these emergent social science methods as well as existing modes of
inquiry in design, I would like to speculate on how I might have approached my earlier
ethnographic and qualitative field research differently in terms of the engagement with
Paper for the seminar "Interventionist Speculation", August 14-15, 2014, Aarhus, DK,
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artifacts, prototypes and formats that would have allowed for the creation of shared
understandings, meanings and values. Such an engagement based on shared meanings
would also necessarily change the relationship between the expert researcher and their
research subject, from a more hierarchical relationship towards one of greater parity. In
traditional social science research, hierarchy is reinforced in a number of ways including
the exchange of business cards (to prove university affiliation), the signing of IRB
documents, and the unilateral recording of interviews in notes, audio/video files and
photos. With respect to the exchange of business cards, in the case of the freelance
workers that I studied, many are without an organizational affiliation and, thus, may be
self-conscious about this fact. While the IRB documents are intended to protect the
research subject from unnecessary risk and harm, they are ill-suited for ethnographic and
qualitative research on topics that could be understood as not of a sensitive nature and
impose unnecessary restrictions. For example, while theoretically, the audio-recording of
an interview could be shared with the research subject, often this does not happen due to
fear that the release of the interview (and its subsequent public circulation) will result in
identifying the site of the study. Rather than a unilateral IRB process in which the
university and the researcher has the power to set the rules of the engagement with
human subjects and data, a memorandum of understanding between both parties could be
created.
Networked Probes
First, in my research with isolated café workers (freelance workers that worked on their
laptops at cafés), towards the end of the interview (in my quest not to disrupt whatever
remnants of objectivity remained and so that my comments would not skew the narrative
of the interview itself), I sometimes recommended books and other materials that I had
come across in my research that might aid my ‘informant’ in self-discovery and learning
about emergent work practices that they were exploring, which they believed were
abnormal. In fact, the 60-minute interview, which took place in a café, was itself a social
interaction that offered some respite from the loneliness and isolation that some
freelancers and other independents reported. With this in mind, a design approach might
suggest the creation of a cultural probe that would allow for both learning and social
Paper for the seminar "Interventionist Speculation", August 14-15, 2014, Aarhus, DK,
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engagement across a network of participants in the research. The probe could either be a
physical object or a digital interaction that could change over time as the research
progressed while remaining anonymous if necessary. In the case of the self-conscious
freelancer fearing their own social stigmatization due to their unorthodox working hours,
the probe could take on the form of an oversized image of a clock, which could
accompany the researcher from interview to interview. The clock could be used to
document the working hours of each research subject and would potentially provide a
sense of community for research participants (albeit an anonymous one). As a learning
and social artifact, the co-created clock might allow for café workers to become aware of
each other’s existence as well as the hours that they worked in order to reinforce a wide
range of social norms around working hours in contrast to the widely enforced 9am-5pm
schedule of many office workers. Alternatively, an anonymous online platform could be
created so that research participants could log their working hours (along with any
explanatory notes) and observe the patterns reported by others.
Performative Prototypes
Second, in my ethnographic encounter with the homeless blogger, despite the complexity
of the socio-economic circumstances that led to his becoming homeless as well as my
concern for such issues, this was not the focus of my study. While an interesting case it
itself, it was not clear how the experience of the homeless blogger mapped onto the
experiences of the freelance workers that made up the majority of my informants.
However, the blogger had managed to find a Starbucks café that was located in mid-town
right across the street from another business that provided free Wi-Fi. Thus, with the aid
of a laptop and a beige trench coat, he was able to blend into the environment without
necessarily having the money to buy coffee. Futhermore, he commented that online, he
could interact with people that did not know that he was homeless. This line of thinking
around urban visibility/invisibility as a theme could inspire the co-creation of a series of
performative prototypes centered around artifacts and/or clothing that might allow for
people to be noticed and/or blend in in public urban spaces in different ways. As a means
of testing the prototypes in order to understand their affordances, researchers and their
Paper for the seminar "Interventionist Speculation", August 14-15, 2014, Aarhus, DK,
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subjects alike could perform experiments in public spaces in which they tested the
artifacts and/or clothing with passersby as part of the research process.
Hybrid Identities Workshop/Performance
My conversation with the transsexual hacker around biological, social and technological
determinism might have played out as a codesign workshop in which hybrid identities
(and their noticeable presence in hacker and maker technology communities) could have
been considered through hands-on engagement in material practices such as coding,
prototyping and/or performance. Like many other hybrid identities (transnational,
multiracial, multidisciplinary), transsexuals may have experienced the need to navigate
multiple genders and/or sexualities. Claudia Hart’s “The Alices (Walking): A Sculptural
Opera and Fashion Show”1 in March 2014 at Eyebeam, a new media art gallery and
studio in New York, offers one example of the ways in which hybrid identities might
come together in the form of an embodied socio-technical performance. The show
employed hybrid digital/physical costumes along with sound and spoken word in a
commentary on augmented reality and queer identities.
The project, dubbed as an augmented reality fashion show, is described as:
a sculptural opera in the guise of an experimental
fashion show about the breakdown between the natural and
the technological and the melding of identities between
machines and people. It is a performance about cloning,
duplication, mutation and transformation, and therefore
about death and rebirth and the ambivalent desire by human
beings for eternal life.
During the performance, five actors stood on the stage wearing costumes reminiscent of
the pixelated digital overlays so often linked with augmented reality. By viewing them
with an iPad outfitted with a custom augmented reality application, it was possible to see
text revealed on panels in their costumes while, at the same time, spoken word and piano
music animated the performance. The text and narration included passages from Lewis
1
See http://eyebeam.org/events/the-alices-walking-a-sculptural-opera-and-fashion-show. Accessed on June
15, 2014.
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Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland such as “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today!”2
Many of Hart’s projects are informed by scholarly research on hybridity from feminist
science studies (Harraway, 1991); thus, I took the use of the word queer to denote a
hybrid understanding of digital materiality. Specifically, the translation of augmented
reality, something that is often linked with digital interfaces and overlays, into a physical
body outfitted with pixelated clothing created an interesting hybrid.
As an extension of this form of material and/or performative engagement, a workshop
could be focused on the creation of artifacts that challenge the male/female dichotomy or
complicate discussions over biological, social and technological determinism. For
example, games, role-playing or bodystorming (Schleicher, Jones, & Kachur, 2010)
and/or visual or physical prototypes could be used as a means of generating consensus or
exposing tension around particular hybrid identities and their relationship to
hacking/making. The workshop could conclude with an exhibit of artifacts or the
performance of a script.
Exhibit on Digital Materiality
My spectrum analysis of Wi-Fi signals in City Hall Park could have generated data for
information visualizations or interactive artifacts in order to explore themes around
digital materiality (Blanchette, 2011; Dourish & Mazmanian, 2011; Leonardi, 2010;
Rosner, Blanchette, Buechley, Dourish, & Mazmanian, 2012). Specifically, by collecting
data about the use of electromagnetic spectrum, I tested the boundaries between what
could be ethnographically observed with the naked eye in public space and in what cases
technical probes could be useful in augmenting the ethnographer’s gaze. Digital and
virtual ethnographic methods (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor, 2012; Rogers, 2013)
have created ways of collecting and augmenting data about online socio-technical
practices, and, similarly, mobile devices and sensors have been employed to gather data
about offline practices. In my case, spectrum analysis was a means of observing human
interactions through non-human networks contextualized in physical spaces. I learned
2
See http://spinabook.com/?s=alice+in+wonderland&submit=Search. Accessed on July 30, 2014.
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that, even on a very rainy day, the wireless network was being actively used, which led
me to conclusions about the specific spatiality and materiality of these networks. Artists
and designers such as Timo Arnall, Julian Oliver, Claudia Hart, Micah Cardenas and
others have explored the theme of hybrid materiality through the creation of artifacts,
exhbits and probes (Arnall, Knutsen, & Martinussen, 2013; Cárdenas, Head, Margolis, &
Greco, 2009; Martinussen & Arnall, 2009; Oliver, 2013). For example, in a recent
project, Arnall created a short film about cloud computing called “Internet Machine” in
order to capture the “spatial, architectural, and material aspects of data centres,
infrastructures that store millions of data, as well as interactions, applications and
services” and to “refute the idea that these spaces are immaterial and post-geographical,
the incorrect myths that surround them” for an exhibit called “Big Bang Data,” which
was installed at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona in Summer 2014.3 As
part of the exhibit, the museum created a series of postcards featuring images of huge,
square, metal data warehouses surrounded by open plains, suburban neighborhoods and
office parks from around the world. Unlike traditional museum postcards, which feature a
memorable piece of artwork, these postcards served as artifacts that made visible the
ugly, the mundane and the forgotten infrastructures that make global connectivity
possible and are essential to the functioning of everyday life. Much in the same way as
the If I had approached my project as a designer, research might have uncovered new
materials for design (such as RFID, spectrum, antennas, routers and cables); alternative
formats for creating and sharing knowledge such as postcards, prototypes and films; and
different contexts and settings where meanings could be unraveled, interrogated and
explored.
Conclusion
This essay has explored the ways in which my own ethnographic interventions –
conducted over eight years ago -- might have been different given a deeper familiarity
with inventive methods, public ethnography and design research methods at the time.
While the context of each research project is different, there is a strong argument for the
use of practice-based research that reconfigures relations between the researcher and their
3
See http://bigbangdata.cccb.org/en/internet-machine-timo-arnall-2/. Accessed on July 31, 2014.
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subjects, allows for greater agency (and even collaboration) on the part of participants,
and explores new ways of creating shared meaning, building knowledge and extending
the value of research outside of peer reviewed journals and conferences. Instead, it is
necessary to leverage university resources as well as the skills of researchers in service to
advancing public knowledge through the co-creation of artifacts, prototypes and events
around important issue of debate. In the spirit of speculation around the productive
interaction between the fields of design and anthropology, and their associated
methodologies, I have proposed three ways that my own ethnographic and qualitative
research might have been different. These examples shed light on new ways of using
design research methods to intervene in the process of ethnographic and qualitative
research with important topics such as pervasive loneliness, homelessness and
transgendered identities.
Design research as a tool for intervention in ethnographic and qualitative research is
useful for opening up new lines of inquiry and knowledge creation rather than for the
express purpose of designing solutions to needs or problems. At the same time, for social
science researchers engaging with practice-based research, there is a need for the creation
of new ways of valuing coproduced knowledge such as multi-author publication formats
that include both researchers and participants and the creation of ways of acknowledging
the creation of artifacts, prototypes, events and performances as scholarly work.
Furthermore, rather than being captured primarily in academic articles and books design
interventions have the potential to be in greater service to research participants as well as
the broader public. This is because artifacts, prototypes, events and performances are
formats that, while they can be understood to represent theories and arguments, they are
also likely to be more accessible to the public than peer-reviewed journal articles.
Ultimately, ethnographic encounters are rich sites for potential design interventions yet
they require a rethinking of the processes, relationships, purposes and scientific norms
around academic research.
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