understand ethnography

Ethnography-I heard this word long before I had any idea of what it exactly means. In my imagination, it was about to live in a strange and isolated island or village, with primitive life styles and some weird religeous practices. Simply put, it was some kind of adventure to me. I finally got the chance to go into it by taking the course called "Qualitative Research Methods". I think it is time for me to take it seriously, and see how this mythic word can have something to do with technologies.

Let's start with the called paper "Representations and Requirements: the values of ethnography in system design" by R.J.Anderson(The weirld thing is I couldn't find this guy by googling...). He firstly trys to distinguish enthonography from data colletion, as taken by most system designers. It does make information available for system designers, but it is different from data collection. To me, it seems data collection means you have ideas of what information you want. But for ethnographers, that is not neccesary. They are more open to probability. How are those ideas from, first of all! Anyway, the methodologies ethnographers apply to access that information is an important issue.

Obviousely, there seem some debates about how formal the representation of ethnographic should be to be used by system designers(That's one of the questions I want to ask since we have a homework to observe and write about waiting. I am wondering what kind of form it should be to make the representation about what we observe to be meaningful). Besides, according to the author, while the designers expects some prescriptive thing as requirements for the system, ethnographers seem staunchly refuse to be prescriptive but rather descriptive(don't know why). The author also mentioned "design sensibility", which means the design problems and the possible ways to approach it(not quite understand).

How did ethnography become so popular in the field of HCI? It was from the motiviation to facilitate requirement capture. Since for users' daily life, it is pretty much oriented towards the practical managemnet of organizational contingencies, the shared cultures, the hurly burly social relations in the workplace, the locally specific skills. All these dimensions of working knowledge, the formal methods of requirements capture, are not able to make visible. Here is where ethnography comes to complement.

But it seems that's a misconception of ethnography, because designers take ethnography as a way to collect data. Actually, ethnography is not data collection but reportage. So it not about recording or summery, but patterning obervation and their interrelationships.Using the author's words, the ethnographers' eyes are always interpretative(But if we can borrow some of its ideas to do data collection, why not?) Such as how to observe, and how to find the underlying orders or patterns. Furthermore, ethnography is analytic, not just about what life looks like.

Another point the author wants to make is that ethnography aims a slightly higher goal. Its goal is not just to tell what users are, but to be germane to new ideas and issues for the designer.

The authors traces some reasons from which those misconceptions are from. Simply put, the author wants to say, ethnography is not just to look, instead it is to motivationally look. He emphasizes some special kills are required to be ethnographers.

Then he emphasizes one of the important techniques is representation. He puts froward a concept called "synecdoche problem for cultural form"( That is an interesting concept. It inspired me to think about cells on our body. Undoutedly, cells are parts of our body, but paradoxically enough, we can grow out a new body from one cell. ) He stresses the analytic strategies based on the justapositioning of antinomies.

After the author explained what ethnography is, he goes ahead to examine issues to apply ethnography for technology design. It seems, there are two choices we can direct to examine ethnography for design, which is reportage genre and the play of possibility.

The author mentioned sometimes, ethnography tends to focus on social relationships, while technology vanishes to be replaced by the familiar nexus of social institutions, power, economic and social itnerest, and historical contingency. Then how can we remedy this outcome?

The author introduced a strategy called the adoption of a faux naivete (don't know why they like to use french sometimes, and don't explain at all). Anyway, I guess it means the other phrase "engineering strange" he uses( What a wierd word! )

A more intuitive way to explain this way is from Latour:

...every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do, were this character not preesnt. This imaginary exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character..

Very straightforward and much easier to understand, right?

I like the author's comment against to take the design frame as that of design problem and its designed solutions. Then the author sketches several rationalizations of organizational life that run against just to be efficient and productive, which is the goal for most designs.