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Design Ethnography

INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods 24 November 2009. Design Ethnography. Outline. Critique by Dourish User-Centered Methods for Design Innovation and Evaluation Stories/Examples The Legend of the ‘Green Button’ The Vineyard Project An Ecological View of Implications.

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Design Ethnography

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  1. INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods 24 November 2009 Design Ethnography

  2. Outline • Critique by Dourish • User-Centered Methods for Design Innovation and Evaluation • Stories/Examples • The Legend of the ‘Green Button’ • The Vineyard Project • An Ecological View of Implications

  3. Dourish critique Dimensions of the critique: • Marginalization of theory • Power relations between disciplines • Restricted model of the relationship between technology and practice • Problems of representation and interaction

  4. Dourish critique • Implied that designers as gatekeepers – but ethnographic approaches show that users are not, “passive recipients of predefined technologies but…actors who collectively create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use.”

  5. Ethnography – characterized by… • subject: the holistic study of people, culture, societies, social relations, social processes, behaviour in situ • method: some component of participant-observation • analysis and writing style: inductive analysis, use of ‘thick description’ and narrative, emic accounts

  6. (By Contrast) Contextual Inquiry [Contextual Design, Beyer and Holtzblatt]

  7. Product Design, Marketing and Related Business Processes Requirements Gathering Contextual Inquiry Ethnographic Approaches

  8. The Legend of the ‘Green Button’

  9. Ethnography of a Usability Study • How we select the ‘site’ of ethnographic fieldwork – is it located only in the world of the user or does it include the designers as well? • Recall Woolgar on “configuring the user” • Considering the broader institution within which user research takes place

  10. The Vineyard Project

  11. The Vineyard Project

  12. The Vineyard Project • What data should we gather and how often? • What level of computational interpretation should we apply to the data? • How should we present the data to users?

  13. The Vineyard Project Findings – priorities and work practice: • Vineyard managers prefer to be in the vineyard not doing desk work or data analysis work • Suggested some sensor network configurations driven by work practice, not technical optimizations • Distribute automatic and human-initiated decisions about data appropriately

  14. An Ecological View of Implications Business strategy Users New form factors Policy Marketing

  15. Summary • Decisions about ‘products’ happen at many levels (and ethnographic approaches can inform them all): • Improving how teams work to design things (studying designers/managers, not just the users) • What ‘market’ to build something for • What thing to build (high-level) • What specific features to include or capabilities to facilitate – i.e. requirements gathering (low-level)

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