Tuesday MetaData

Implications for Design
Paul Dourish, University of California, Irvine, USA

Provides an alternative account of the value of ethnographic work based on historical and conceptual exploration of ethnographic practice. Helps practitioners, researchers, and reviewers assess ethnographic studies and their contributions.

• What has ethnography done for us?
• What does ethnographic practice involve?
• Ethnography in Context
o Engagement with a field setting from member's action to member's experience
o Long-term, immersive, participant-observation, a text, interpretive, analytic, increasingly a partnership with informants
o Understanding the underlying social organization
• Four issues
o The Marginalization of Theory
• Ethnography as a set of field techniques: "Toolbox" view
• Analytic Practices / Positions
• "An ethnographer is not a tape recorder"
• Analytic Stance / Interpretive Practice
o Ethnographic Analysis
• Objectivity and Subjectivity
• Ethnographic data is not "collected" but generated arises from the encounter between an ethnographer and the field setting
• Proceeds from a consciousness of subjectivities
• Be conscious of subjectivity
o Power Relations
• Asymmetric disciplinary relationships
• Design as the natural end-point?
• User interface design/human-computer interaction
• Design as a privileged activity
• The site of design?
o Technology and Practice
• Beyond the "two domains" approach
• Two separate worlds linked by problems that ethnography can uncover
• A broader view of practice
• How technology is put to use: adopted, adapted, repurposed, appropriated
• How people create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use
• How technologies take on social meaning
• A site where people perform social action
o Representation
• Ethnography in service of what?
• "Objective, instrumental, actionable" accounts
• Faming encounters
• Bridging epistemic communities
• What I'm Not Saying...
o Implications for design are bad
o Ethnography is irrelevant to practice
o poor metric for evaluating ethnographic contributions
o Narrow focus on design may underplay ethnography contribution
o Interdisciplinary engagements require conscious attention to power relations
o All stakeholders must have a place at the table and have a distinct role in an interdisciplinary work
• Site of social and cultural production