Work_ Ethnography and System Design Bob Anderson

Work, Ethnography and System Design Bob Anderson Ryan Yasui ICS 280 March 11, 2004 Overview Introduction  History of Ethnography  Central Ideas  Ethnography in Practice  Remaining Issues  Introduction  Definition  Ethnography is a particular analytic strategy for assembling and interpreting the results of fieldwork gathered very often by participant observation  Author’s Aim  Describe ethnography  Raise a few questions against which to determine if ethnography might actually be what design needs and is able to use  Decide if ethnography is what system design should use. A Bit of History  Invented by Bronislaw Malinoski in 1915  Spent three years on the Trobriand Islands  Invented the modern form of fieldwork and ethnography as its analytic component  Collected three types of data  Synoptic Charts  Detailed description of day to day life and activities  All stories, narratives, myths, magical formulae Motivation Behind Ethnography   “Things aren’t always what they seem”  Appearances do not tell the whole story The native is not necessarily the best judge of what they are doing  Must combine this with other analysis  There is a need to look behind appearances in a detailed way Central Ideas  Ethnography is a representation of what has been seen, heard, and found in the field  Not just writing up field notes  Kula Ring example   Ethnographers “know” in ways that others can’t Ethnography is also about “us”  Ordinariness of our everyday life Central Ideas  Communities of Practice  Viewed work groups as communities of practice  Learning a culture is learning these practices  “Situatedness” of Action  Phenomena of sociological inquiry is the outcome of structures of activities  Determine “what’s going on” by local, occasioned, and situated actions  Example is Conversation Analysis Summary of Central Ideas    Dependent upon fieldwork as its investigative technique. Ethnography is the analytic component of this investigation Concerned with representing communities of practice and actual work practice by examining the minutiae of working lives Sees the structure and order of working lives as “situated”, “occasioned”, and “co-produced” Ethnography In Practice  Integration  Ethnographer is a member of the design team  Used in conceptual stage, the design requirements analysis stage, and the evaluation of design stage  Objectives of the study are set by the design team Ethnography In Practice  Complementary  Objectives  are set by what the ethnographer perceives them to be May not be what the designers want  Aim is to raise awareness of the setting in which the technology will be deployed Ethnography In Practice  Independence  Ethnographer doesn’t want to impact design  Findings are relevant to debates within the social sciences Remaining Issues Methodology?  Relationship to theory?  Scope of the findings?  Politics of intervention?  Methodology or Gift?  Portrayed as a methodology  Does it have a body of techniques and procedures that anyone can apply?   It is more interpretive than empirical  Is A the ethnographer’s skill a “gift”? Need to look at the broader method way of “finding out”  The fieldwork experience is most important  How do we relate these findings to design? Relationship to Theory  Disagreement with current “Engineering style theory”  Divide and Conquer  Ethnography needs to decide on its epistemological grounding and how it relates to other accepted approaches before it can be integrated into these approaches Scope Of The Findings  Common reservation is its idiosyncratic character  Findings are from a particular point of view   But generalizations are needed for design  Based on summarization and abstraction Ethnography can provide this with some trade-offs  The user’s point of view Politics Of Intervention Designers don’t feel that they are responsible for social/organization effects of their technology  Ethnographers disagree  All design is in/for someone’s interests   Whose are dominant?  How do you decide on politics for design? Questions?    What can ethnography contribute to design? Feasibility of this approach? How far can this be taken to develop a practical, design-oriented social science?  Above just “consciousness raising”  Examples of ethnographic analyses in Software?