Lecture 5 (September 27^th)

 Agenda: Continued discussion of ethnography (the papers from last week + three weeks back), discuss limitations and pitfalls of ethnography. Practical tips on how to do it.

Plenary discussion of the groups’ draft proposals.

WHY ETHNOGRAPHY?

Suchman and Trigg (1991): What can ethnographic studies of work contribute? Explains the assumptions of the situated perspective on work practices. Practical advice on video recording, e.g. bottom page 76, “What we record”: setting-oriented, person-oriented, object-oriented and task-oriented records. Also discusses how to analyze and work with video.

Hughes et al. (1994): An argument for ethnography to inform design, and a discussion of when and how to do it. Four categories: Concurrent, quick and dirty, evaluative ethnography, re-assessment of previous studies

 
HOW?

How can ethnographic studies be relevant for design? How have CSCW researchers actually gone about it? Harper (2000) addresses the question of how you can design an organisational ethnography to ”cover a sufficient spectrum of organisationally situated tasks to enable proper examination of any particular subset of those tasks”. What do you do, where do you go, who do you talk to, in what order etc?  Harper’s principle for organising (i.e. planning and conducting) the organisational ethnography is to follow the life cycle of information (and its various modalities). The life cycle of information is its ’birth’, ’life’ and ’death’: where is it produced, worked up, reviewed, circulated, used, stored and then forgotten about. He also discusses how to become accepted in the setting, and at what level of detail you should focus your data collection. 

•         A design-oriented approach aimed at getting a grip on ‘context’, what it is, how it interferes. Practical way to gather information relevant for design, used in HCI, CSCW, IS research.

•         Advocates a relationship model, the Master/apprentice model as fundamental for the investigation. Implies: No explicit teaching, just watching the work, detecting what matters, seeing details. Requires humility, inquisitiveness, attention.

•         Four principles:

–        context (go to where the work is, summaries versus ongoing experience, abstract versus concrete data)

–        partnership (help customers articulate their work experience, alternate between watching and probing, teach customer how to see work by probing work structure. Avoid other relationship models (than the Master/apprentice), e.g. interviewer/interviewee: you are not there to get a list of questions answered. Expert/novice: you aren’t there to answer questions either. Guest/host: it is a goal to be nosy.

–        interpretation: Design ideas are the end product of a chain of reasoning. Sharing interpretations with customers won’t bias the data, but teaches customers to see structure in work, and let them fine-tune interpretations.

–        focus: Clear focus steers the conversation, focus reveal detail, but conceals the unexpected (look for surprises and contradictions, when you nod, what you don’t know). Commit to challenging your assumptions and validating them.

From Beyer and Holzblatt’ book ”Contextual Design” (1998):

Five work models are suggested. These may give some ideas about how to conduct fieldwork:

•         The flow model: To get work done, people divide up responsibilities among roles and coordinate with each other while doing it.

•         The sequence model: Work tasks are ordered, and is executed stepwise

•         The artifact model: People create, use and modify things in the course of doing work.

•         The cultural model: Work takes place in a culture, which defines expectations, desires, policies, values, and the whole approach people take to their work.

•         The physical model: What happens in a physical environment either supports and enables the work, or gets in the way.

The work flow model:

Describes the communication and coordination necessary:

This perspective describes: Who are the individuals involved and their roles and responsibilities. The relevant other groups. The communication flows and the artifacts used, and breakdowns/problems in the communication flow. (see page 92-93)

Look for:

• Coordination
• Strategy (motivation, reason for action)
• Roles (how does tasks hang together to create a role?)
• Informal communication structures

The SequenceModel:

Aims at discovering people’s strategies behind their action, their intentions, and what matters to them in organising their work.

Shows: intent, triggers, steps, order (lines, loops, and/or branches), breakdowns. (see page 98)

Look for:

• Hesitations and errors
• Triggers
• Intents 

The Artifact Model:

Aims at focusing on the role things play in getting work done.(E.g. to-do-lists, forms, documents etc). Artifacts reveals the assumptions, concepts, strategy, and structure that guide the people. (see page 104)

Look for:

• Structure
• Information content
• Annotations
• Presentation
• Usage

The Cultural Model:

Work takes place in a culture, which defines expectations, desires, policies, values, nad the whole approach people take to their work. THis approach aims to describe the persons or groups that influences others, the nature of the influence and the extent of this influence on work, as well as conflicts/problems

Look for:

• Tone
• Policies
• Organisational influence

The Physical Model:

How the physical environment matters for work (enables and/or constrains it). Describes places/spaces, physical structures, and layout, the usage and movement in these spaces, the location of hardware, software, communication tools and other artifacts, and breakdowns/problems.

Look for:

• Organisation of space
• Division of space
• Grouping of people
• Organisation of workplaces
• Movements

GROUP WORK:  Discussion of methodological issues in Bardram and Bossen’s paper.

CAVEATS ABOUT ETHNOGRAPHY

Forsythe (1999): Six misconceptions:

1. Is it just about common sense? No, you should problematise things that are taken for granted.
2. Is an ’insider’ view best? Not necessarily, the task is not to replicate the insiders’ perspectives
3. ’Anything goes’ in terms of methods? Preformulated study design are avoided, but epistemological discipline and systematic method are pursued
4. ”Doing fieldwork is just chatting with people and reporting what they say”. No, people’s views are data, not results. Understanding and analysing.
5. ”To find out what people do, just ask them”. Well, the predictive value of verbal representations and the generality of short-term observations are questionable, and must be complemented with extended observations.
6. ”Behavioural/organisational patterns exist, we must just discover them”. It is not a matter of ’looking’, the expertise rests with the analyst, not in the recording technique.

Zuiderent (2002): ”Blurring the Center. On the politics of ethnography.”

–        Problematises the relationship between ethnographic insights and design

–        Emphasis on the ”political dimension”

–        Fieldwork frustrations turned into analytic resource