Reading
Bob Anderson, 1997: “Work,
Ethnography and System Design”
Seminar on Qualitative Methods in Design
WS11/12
Gunnar Stevens
Human Computer Interaction
University of Siegen, Germany
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR ATTEMPTING TO ARGUE?
HOW TO CAPTURE AND ARTICULATE THE
VALUE, WHAT ETHNOGRAPHY ACTUALLY
BRINGS TO DESIGN
What do you think the author is most concerned about regarding this issue?
“I hope to raise a few questions against which to assess how far ethnography might actually be
what design might need and be able to use” - Anderson
Motivating the paper’s topic
CSCW as Point of departure
‣ Paradigm arena for design-oriented
ethnographic work (Moran & Anderson
1990)
‣ Reasons for its emergence
‣ Replacing of the mainframe paradigm by the
distributed computing paradigm
‣ Convergence of communication and
computational technology
‣ Emphasis on (co-located or distributed) work
groups
‣ Productivity paradox (Strassman 1990)
‣ Expectations
‣ Overcome the “productivity” crisis and the
failures of using computer technology in
practice
“Designers interested in augmenting or replacing
current artefacts ... do well to understand how they
work, as well as what their limits are. In addition,
those interested in supporting the design of
modifiable artefacts do well to understand the
everyday processes of modification ....
Design realism can be achieved, we believe, through
new methods for understanding the organization
of work practice in detail.” - Suchman & Trigg 1991
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Motivating the paper’s topic
Re-orientation of social science in design
‣ Several approaches have (some) affinity to qualitative methods
‣ Participatory Design and socio-technical system approaches (i.a. Greenbau, &
Kyng, 1991)
‣ Social studies of technology and science (i.a Button, 1993)
‣ Organizational Theory (i.a Sproull & Kieser, 1991)
‣ Re-orientation is generally welcome, yet often produces unnecessary confusion:
‣ “working with users” came to mean “doing ethnography”
‣ almost no distinction between fieldwork, participant observation and
ethnography
‣ neglecting the kinds of analytic outputs which can be derived from or
legitimated by them
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Motivating the paper’s topic
Fieldwork, ethnography and design
‣ Fieldwork
‣ Umbrella term utilize many different ways of data collection
techniques, among them participant observation.
‣ Ethnography
‣ Analytic strategy for assembling and interpreting the results of
fieldwork gathered very often by participant observation
‣ Designers have, by and large, been more likely to be interested in
‣ fieldwork in general than in ethnography in particular
‣ as methodology to enhance current ways of understanding and
representing the end user requirements for interactive systems
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“To decide if ethnography is what systems design ought to call upon, we need first to get straight
what ethnography is and where it came from” - Anderson
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC HERITAGE
European thread
Inventing the Professional Stranger
‣ 1915: (Modern) Ethnography is invented
by Malinowski
‣ before him it was mainly speculative
histories with a taste of exotic reading
‣ Living and working with the Trobianders
(Island of New Guinea) for several years
‣ Field study published in a series of
detailed monographs
‣ Becoming familiar with a culture by
learning the language, participating in
day-to-day life and activities
‣ Collecting stories, narratives, myths for
the subjective understanding
(verstehen instead of erklären) and how
the society represents itself
European thread
Post-hoc representation and
the bedrock of given accounts
‣ An ethnography is a “post hoc” representation of
what has been seen, heard and found “in the
field”.
‣ Writing the ethnography is not just “writing up”
the field notes. It involves their interpretation and
analysis.
‣ Functional explanations and interpretations
‣ Activities as practical solutions of general
problems of societies (E.g. the Kula Ring in its
function solving the social cohesion problem)
‣ Yet, other theoretical frameworks are possible
(E.g. Barth 1967, Harris 1978, Levi Strauss 1969)
‣ Ethnographic practice is a particular form of
legitimation. Ethnographers “know” in ways
others don’t and can’t. And what they know
derives in part from personal experience.
“Things are not what they seem, and
appearances are certainly not the whole of
the story. This need to look behind
appearances in careful, detailed and
systematic ways is, of course, the
common inspiration of all scientific and
investigative work. It is also why ethnography
insists that the native, the participant, the
actor, the person on the Clapham Omnibus,
is not necessarily the best judge and their
views the final arbiter on what they are doing.
Of course we must ask them. But we must
also colligate their answers with many
others forms of evidence”
- Malinowski by Anderson
American thread
Beyond the banana boat
‣ Born 1921: Franz Boas and his studies of the
native Americans of the Pacific North-West
Coast
‣ Interdisciplinary outlook
‣ Draws e.g. on psychology (M. Mead),
cognitive science (Bateson)
‣ No rigid separation between Anthropology
and Sociology or (commercial) System
Design (like in Europe)
‣ Studying a “pre-industrial” or certainly “nonwestern” culture close to hand
‣ Comparative focus, e.g. what they found
“over there” with what was left “at home”.
‣ Oriented towards the “subjective” experiential
in contrast to the European focus around
“objective” institutional matters
Post-modernism
“All I want is the facts, Ma’am” is no longer
a defensible position
‣ 1970s: adoption of Deconstructionism, taking into account that writing culture is
shaped by the socio-political contexts of the author
‣ Once the authority of the ethnographer’s experience had been undermined, to what
else could they turn?
Weak implications
• Accepting that no Archimedean
position exist, from which a single,
overarching, description to end all
descriptions can be derived
• The foreign appears in relation of
the own attitudes, values and
orientations of its author and
audience
Strong implications
• Ethnographies always follow
dominant ideological structures
(either affirmative or in resistance)
• Representations are no more than
the ideological epiphenomena of
such interests
Newer strands and topics
‣ Re-discovery of culture as “communities of
practice”
‣ Boys in White (Becker et al. 1961): Tracking
the career of medical students
‣ Eckert (1989): Focusing on unofficial aspects
of school and becoming a member of a
culture in knowing the distinct categories,
symbols, codes and practices
‣ Situatedness of action / workplace studies
‣ Garfinkel (1967): Instead that social actors
are “programmed by culture”, stability of
social life is a result of the actors’ mundane
competence to make the situation
accountable for each other
‣ Machines can offer a number of “accounts” of
their own state, yet they are incapable of
monitoring how those representations are
interpreted by the user.
“While Suchman’s work marks a turning point, it cannot really be thought of as initiating a social
science interest in advanced information systems. [...] What it did more than anything else was to
contribute to the strengthening of design interest in social science” - Anderson
RAISON D’ETRE OF BRINGING
ETHNOGRAPHY TO DESIGN
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Relationship between ethnography and
design
‣ Integration
‣ Ethnographer is seen as a member of the design team including
‣ the conceptual stage, the design requirements analysis stage, and at the evaluation stage of
the design
‣ Objectives of the studies are primarily design oriented
‣ Complementarity
‣ Far the largest grouping
‣ Questions not set by the design team but oriented towards what the ethnographer perceives their
needs to be
‣ raising designers’ awareness or “sensibilities” with regard to particular aspects of the setting
within which the technology under consideration has to be deployed
‣ Independence
‣ Primary not interested in direct and concrete design implications
‣ Findings are positioned relevant to ongoing debates within or between the social sciences (and
sometimes with design itself)
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Set up an agenda of paradigmatic problems
What ethnography bring to design
‣ In Anderson’s view, the most important topics that need to be discussed
with regard to the role of ethnography in design are:
‣ the character of the method
‣ the relationship to theory
‣ the scope of findings
‣ the politics of intervention
‣ … and the recurring question of ethnography’s capacity “to cope with
change”
‣ Yet Anderson remarks that this would express both a deep lack of
understanding of ethnography and a surprising lack of
sophistication concerning the processes of technologically inspired
change
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Methodology
The gift of writing
‣ Ethnography
‣ a gift of writing up - not a methodology of finding out
‣ write with a voice and from a point of view
‣ refer to hermeneutic disciplines for guidance, instead than to the
natural sciences.
‣ importance of (unique) fieldwork experience, not the fieldwork
findings
‣ Replications of findings
‣ Some ethnographers do indeed see themselves producing findings
of the same logical order (but vastly different in style) as
experiments.
‣ Others would deny this entirely, stressing the importance of voice,
perspective and genre
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Epistemology and Constitution theory
The constitution of the worlds we life in
‣ Proposal of a unified science of HCI following a heuristic divide-and-conquer
methodology (Newell and Card, 1985)
‣ technical engineering-style of theory of a psychological form
‣ Analyze pieces of the complex problem in isolation
‣ Ethnographer’s rationalism (in a Kantian sense) with idiosyncratic tendencies
‣ denial of the realism which underpins divide and conquer
‣ the worlds of the social, the psychological, the physical, etc. are theoretically
constituted and hence the disciplines listed may well be incommensurable.
‣ general scheme into which the various disciplinary conceptual structures can
be translated
‣ The tolerance of ecumenism considered harmful
‣ mask the impossibility of integrating incommensurable approaches (e.g.
ethnography versus experimental research)
‣ leave such integration to the wit and ingenuity of the individual researcher
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Scope of findings
Context matters
‣ What the designer needs, it is said, is generality
‣ generality is held to reside in summarization or abstraction
‣ moves beyond the specifics of the individual case
‣ use of notations or formalisms of some kind
‣ Common misunderstanding
‣ With ethnography emphasis on particularity common reservation
against taxonomies are formalizations
‣ Manifold empty and unusable generalizations in literature
‣ Cooperation is important, work is complex, context matters, …
‣ Ethnography can provide abstractions but at the price of giving up on
something else
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Politics of intervention
Which Side Are You On?
‣ Traditional stances
‣ Ethnography eschews intervention
‣ Designers see themselves as technological, not social engineers
‣ Deconstructionism and studies on the social construction of technology:
‣ When designing technology, we are designing social relations
‣ Forms of argument are not to be grounded in pure reason, but in social interests
‣ Raises tough questions
‣ What could be the bases on which to evaluate arguments, conclusions and the
decisions derived from them?
‣ Whose interests should be put first? The company? The users? The discipline?
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Coping with change
Relative stability of social practices
‣ Prejudice about the “conservatism” of Ethnography
‣ “Any intervention is bound to be devastating for existing practice”
‣ Neglects the evolutionary stance of Ethnography
‣ change is still part and parcel of the phenomena under analysis
‣ What ethnographers like Suchman refuse
‣ the inadvertent butchery of fine grained and complex practices solely
in the name of technologically driven change
‣ not the fact of change which is in question but “what” is changed and
why; and in whose interests; and at whose behest
‣ Drawing on implications for explicitly engineered change, it are
ethnographers – not their ethnographies – who are cautious.
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The social turn began with a disillusionment with prevailing
ways of understanding use and users and with ways of
drawing on such understandings as there were through to the
design of systems - This still remains the challenge
DISCUSSION
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