Abstract
In this chapter we look at how various kinds of ethnographic studies done within social science and systems design have tended to generate ‘scenic descriptions’ of action and interaction. Scenic description orients us to grossly observable features of action and interaction without examining the ‘just how’ of its doing, i.e., just how what was done was done so as to pull it off as the thing that grossly observable is. This concern with the absence of the lived orderliness of action and interaction is framed in terms of the discussion of ‘work’ as it is understood within ethnomethodological studies. The critical thing to note here is that ‘work’ is not restricted to what goes on in the workplace but is a generic feature of interaction. It draws attention to the fact that action and interaction, wherever it takes place, is always an achievement. The work of interaction is all too often missed in ethnographic studies, resulting in descriptions of human activity that have the character of ‘X did this, and Y did that’, without lifting the lid on how it is done as an organised interactional accomplishment. The problem here is that if ethnography resides at a scenic level of description, detailing merely observed behaviour that anyone can see, it can and will misdirect designers’ understanding of the foundational relationship between ethnography and systems design and what designers can hope to take away from ethnographic studies.
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- 1.
Becker was a jazz musician, had been since the age of 15, and he complemented his own observations with informal interviews of other jazz musicians on the Chicago circuit.
- 2.
One of the ‘off-line’ criticisms that we received of our original paper was that we were punching below the belt because we used examples that were written by ‘junior’ researchers. The paper by Blythe et al., however, is authored by robust, long in the tooth, senior researchers of professorial standing. Thus we hope that attention can be focused on the ideas, not the people offering them, which is what we were actually doing in the original paper.
- 3.
As we were writing this a very apposite news item appeared on one of the UK’s television channels about a couple who were celebrating 80 years of marriage; she was 101 and he was 105 years old. They were interviewed in their home sitting on the settee, smartly dressed, quipping, holding hands, lucidly reminiscing about aspects of their life together and as ‘on the ball’ as the 30 odd year old interviewer.
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Button, G., Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., Tolmie, P. (2015). The Missing What of Ethnographic Studies. In: Deconstructing Ethnography. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21954-7_6
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