Abstract
The point and purpose of doing ethnography here is to ‘inform’ design – i.e., to help designers figure out what to build and give concrete shape to computing systems. It is worth stating the obvious, as it all too often seems to get forgotten in ethnographic discourses surrounding design that doing ethnography is not about ethnography per se but about design. So how can ethnography give shape to design? What practical approaches can be used to leverage ethnographic findings for design purposes? How can it be used to figure out what to build? It has often been said that it is very difficult to relate ethnographic findings to design: that ethnography produces rich or ‘thick’ descriptions of work whereas design is necessarily about abstraction and therefore requires some means of parsing and reducing the complexity represented by thick descriptions of work to develop computational models that may subsequently be implemented in computing systems. Over two decades of practical involvement in design a range of approaches have emerged and/or been appropriated to help ethnographers make their studies relevant to design and translate them into design resources ‘telling’ designers what to build. Our purpose here is to outline these.
Computer scientists, software engineers and system developers have a specific mastery of modeling and programming. The construction of such models is an essentially logical exercise of generic and abstract character. Ethnography counterbalances this abstract and generic disposition, highlighting the considerable difference, and often discrepancy, between the logical and the practical order of an activity.
John Hughes
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Notes
- 1.
IEEE Standard 830–1998 Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specification http://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/830-1998.html
- 2.
As noted in the previous chapter, the framework does not provide concepts for conducting ethnographic analysis but for presenting those analyses and bridging between ethnography and design.
- 3.
Bridging the Rural Divide EPSRC EP/I001816/1, www.bridgingtheruraldivide.com
- 4.
This is a reconstituted scenario assembled for the purposes of exposition. In practice, a variety of scenarios were constructed as our understanding of the design problem evolved. This scenario re-represents the key features of an evolving set of scenarios to provide a textually coherent elaboration of “typical and significant user activities” (Carroll 2000).
- 5.
Storyboards are one of many ‘lo-fidelity’ techniques for sketching out design problems and solutions, including thumbnail sketches, wireframes, and comic strips; any and all of these techniques can be used to leverage ethnographic findings into the elaboration of user-machine interaction.
- 6.
See, for example, http://www.placebooks.org/placebooks/
- 7.
- 8.
Multiple Intimate Media Environments http://mime.cs.nott.ac.uk/content/concept3.html
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Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., Tolmie, P. (2012). Informing Design. In: Doing Design Ethnography. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2726-0_8
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