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E-Lecture 4: Fieldwork in Interaction Design (List 3 features of…
E-Lecture 4: Fieldwork in Interaction Design
Learning objectives
Outline the meaning of the term ethnography
Describe the origins of ethnography
List 3 features of ethnography
Outline 3 planning considerations
Describe the issues of ethnography in the field
Outline what ethnography is good for
Outline the meaning of the term ethnography
a) Fieldwork is practical work conducted by a researcher in a natural environment rather than in a laboratory
b) Ethnography is an approach that you adopt in collecting and interpreting field studies materials
Describe the origins of ethnography
a) Origins
The origins of ethnography are in Anthropology, the study of humankind and human culture.
Ethnography is usually characterised by ethnographer spending time in place among a distinct group of people
One of the most famous example of ethnographic studies in Anthropology was that by Edward Evans-Pritchard who studied the Nuer tribe in the 1920s and 1930s
c i) Neur Time-Reckoning
The Neur people are neolithic ethnic group primarily inhabiting the Nile valley
They concentrating in South Sudan with representatives also found in Southwestern Ethiopia
They speak the Neur language
Evans- Pritchard discovered that they had a different concept of time compared to us
Their ideas of time were guided by their activities of caring for and feeding cattles
In fact, they didn’t really have an abstract concept of time as we do
They had no equivalent word for time, that they do not talk about time as something that passes , can be wasted, can be saved and so forth
List 3 features of ethnography:
Taken as a basis, Evan-Pritchard’s studies of the Nuer offer 3 defining features of ethnography
i) Participant observation: is not the kind of standing-back objective observation that you might expect from quantitative approaches, instead the idea in ethnography is to get to know the people. Participant observation means gaining a deep familiarity by immersing yourself in the culture of the people.
ii) Interpretation (thick description) : is not something that occurred after data is being gathered, but rather it’s parts and parcel with the process of carrying out observation . This is what Clifford ( a central figure in Anthropology) describe as a thick description.
iii) Analytical orientation: Unlike other approaches, ethnography does not just aim to come up with objective description of events and activities, rather it takes an analytical orientation. So the goal is to try and make sense of thing as they are being observed
Design Ethnography: (HCI, informed-design, briefer, focused)
With the ethnographic approach is applied to human-computer interaction or ubiquitous computing is change slightly
The aim to inform design means the studies are far briefer and more focussed than those in anthropology
i) Example: Air traffic control
One of the most quoted examples of early attempt to apply ethnography to the process of design concerns studies of air traffic control.
Ethnographic researchers look at the collaborative work of air traffic controllers organising airplanes in their airspace.
Particular focus was given to the use of flight strips, the paper strips that you can see in this picture detailing planes in the air.
The studies consider how the flight strips help them with planning, management of plane trajectory and coordinations between controllers
The flight strips were seen to represent the arrangement of planes in the sky
Air traffic controllers could glance at the arrangement that the flight strips as a way of assessing, reacting to and anticipating what is happening in the air space
ii) Anthropology v design
This example serves a good illustration of some of the things which are in common between ethnography and anthropology. And ethnography and design and some of the differences
But there are 4 things however that made ethnography applied to design different from its application in anthropology. (less-prolonged, focus on specific interactions, ethnomethodology., design outcome)
The research undertaken under much greater time constraint, so the study were less prolonged
They usually focus on specific interactions in the settings. In our example, the use of flight strips
They made use of a particular approach to ethnography known as ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology is a method of analysis that examines how individuals use everyday conversation to construct a common sense view of the world
Concern an orientation towards the design outcome to help with the activity involved
In common with anthropological approaches;
These studies involve an in situ investigation going into the workplace where it will happen
It also involves the collection of large quantity of field materials and
the use of thick textual descriptions, giving an interpretive analysis
Outline 3 planning considerations
Planning (Type of technology, environment, user type and data recording)
One of the first thing you have to do in an ethnomethodology study is to plan.
The scope of the project is often determined by the type of technology involved , whether it involved investigating the home situations, or the office or is it mobile? What kind of people will be involved?will it be working people,young people, elderly people, families
It also important to consider how the data is gonna be collected, whether it’s gonna be observation? Interviews, audio recording, video recording?
ii) Sampling & Generalization (sample, population, generalisation, use in practice)
In quantitative approaches, you would usually randomly select a sample and use that to generalised to the wider population
In an ethnographic studies however, the number of participants are usually too small to be statistically generalisable
Moreover, it is not clear to what extent the sample can be said to be representative of the population
But the central goal of an ethnographic study it’s not to determine of what’s true of the entire population, what’s true for everybody but rather to think about how a system is actually used in practice and therefore how its design might be improved
iii) Access to participants (requires user time, snowballing, alternatives [observation, auto-ethnography]
Ethnographic approaches to design are very time consuming, not just for the researchers, but also for the participants, the users
It can be very difficult to find more than 2 people who are willing to give up a large chunk of everyday life to help you with your study.
One of the approaches to this problem is to use snowballing method
The idea of snowballing is you get the first two or 3 people to introduce you to another 2, to introduce you to further participants and so on, accruing participants on a rolling basis
The difficulty of gaining access to participants means it worth considering alternatives, for example just observing people in a setting, with drawing an activity or undertaking an autoethnography
Autoethnography just means studying yourself using self-reflections and writing to explore your personal experience
i) Hypotheses (no initial hypotheses, opening up possibilities)
Unlike quantitative studies, ethnographic approaches do not normally have a predefined set of hypothesis which you’re looking to test
Instead, ethnographic studies are usually exploratory and looking to opening up possibilities
Describe the issues of ethnography in the field:
Going to the field to interview someone or observe them can be a daunting activity. - It’s likely the first time you do it, you’ll feel uncomfortable, awkward or uneasy.
Rather than aiming to make it perfect and get it right, the important thing is to get your hands dirty
ii) Analysis
The classic image of ethnography is the researcher alone writing up a field note in his or her tent after day of observation
Today’s reality is that most of the writings occurs back at the office
The type of field work data collected is likely to determine the types of analysis that can be conducted
Taylor draws attention to the use of video in particular because it offers a powerful means of capturing field materials
iii) Analytic sensibilities (analytic sensibility, xerox photocopier from 1980s)
The term ‘analytic sensibility’ is used by Taylor to refer to the process of interpreting and analysing data as it is being collected
Taylor uses the example of Suchman works on photocopying task to illustrate the notion of analytic sensibility
Rather than being able to construct a plan in advance which would then be executed, users will face with all manner of problems that would go wrong in real life scenarios
This leads people to rethink the conventional notion of planning in artificial intelligence
i) Reflexivity & Indifference (objectivity, reflexivity, indifference)
One of the philosophical issues with ethnography is the extent to which it can be objective.
If the aim is to immerse yourself in the activity of the users, to what extent are you in an objective rather than subjective positions
Rather than aiming to be objective, ethnographers undertake a principle of reflexivity
The idea is you take a reflective stance on the field work, recognising inevitable subjectivity of the accounts that you produced
The second related concept is the policy of indifference. In producing the analysis, you unavoidably take on an authoritative or privacy status.
The policy indifference prioritises the users way of doing and seeing things over and above the themes, theories and methods of the research
Outline what ethnography is good for (contextual enquiry, blindingly obvious, discover design spaces, opening up possibilities)
Various attempts would have been made to reconcile ethnography and design but have not’ been particularly successful
Contextual enquiry was useful in terms of gaining a broad picture of organisational patterns rather than the detail features of social interactions
But as Taylor points out, it has become running jokes in some circles that design publications seed into a little more than suggesting the blindingly obvious
Taylor’s advice is that rather than seeing ethnography as a way of narrowing in on design, it should be look at as a way to discover the design spaces and how technological ideas might be subsequently investigated in more detail