Reading Bob Anderson, 1997: “Work, Ethnography and System Design”

1. ReadingBob Anderson, 1997: “Work, Ethnography and System Design” Seminar on Qualitative Methods in Design WS11/12 Gunnar Stevens Human Computer Interaction University of Siegen, Germany

2. 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 What is the author attempting to argue? How to capture and articulate the value, what ethnography actually brings to design

3. Motivating the paper’s topicCSCW 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

4. Motivating the paper’s topicRe-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.aSproull & 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

5. Motivating the paper’s topicFieldwork, 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

6. “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

7. European threadInventing 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

8. European threadPost-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

9. American threadBeyond 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 “non-western” 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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. “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

13. 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)

14. Set up an agenda of paradigmatic problemsWhat 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

15. MethodologyThe 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

16. Epistemology and Constitution theoryThe 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

17. Scope of findingsContext 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

18. Politics of interventionWhich 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 • Whatcould 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?

19. Coping with changeRelative stability of social practices • Prejudice about the “conservatism” of Ethnography • “Any interventionis 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.

20. 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