Transcript Design Processes Lecture 1

Processes of Design
Sixth lecture:
Ethnography
27 October 2003
William Newman
Evaluation: Revisiting the Problem
•
•
•
•
•
•
We must simulate the end result
We have particular problems:
Simulating the user
Simulating the context
Simulating how the user performs the task
Ethnography helps us understand these
better
• This is my view of the What and How of
Ethnography.
What Is Ethnography?
• Fieldwork methods for the study
and analysis of social settings
• Draws on methods used in studies
of primates and primitive tribes
• A research activity, increasing our
knowledge of the social world
• Links with philosophy rather than
scientific theory.
How Computer Research discovered
Ethnography
• Jeff Rulifson’s Office Research
Group at Xerox PARC
• Recruiting anthropologists to study
office workers
• Advanced Systems Dept (197880): Altos in the White House
• Lucy Suchman and Situated
Action.
Work Practice and Technology
Research at PARC 1980-2000
• Practical ethnography and design
participation
• San Jose Airport study:
The Flight Tracker example
• Orr’s study of service technicians:
‘War stories’ as teaching materials
• The Denver Project:
Connecting service techs by radio
• Ethnographic studies continue at
PARC (Jack and Marilyn Whalen).
Ethnography in Europe
• Wes Sharrock (Manchester Univ.)
• Lancaster Univ.’s Sociology Dept.
• Scandinavian participative design
research (Susanne Bodker)
• Xerox Cambridge: from pure HCI to
Sociology and Ethnography
(Richard Harper)
• The Xerox IMF study.
Responsibility Modelling
• Why are systems accepted by their users,
and other rejected?
• Rejection of an air traffic control workstation
• IMF Economic Database failure
• Question: What matters most to workers?
• Hypothesis: Whatever makes them effective
team members, and reduces the risk of being
fired.
• I.e. meeting their responsibilities
• But is it valid to make predictions based on
studies of social behaviour?
Ethnomethodology (EMy)
• A long word about studying smallscale social action
• Concerned with everyday social
action and its production of order
• Origins in Conversation Analysis
• Examples:
• Gaze and speech interruption
• Patients’ design of pain cries
• The 10-second free turn in medical consultations.
EMy’s limitations
• Looks at fine detail -- influences only the file
detail (UI) of design
• Invalidity of generalizing about social action
• Generalizing therefore falls on the designer
• EMists don’t build on each others’ work -they prefer to demolish it!
• So there’s work to be done.
Summary: Ethnographic study methods
•
•
•
•
Direct observation
Interview
Video and/or audio recording
Diary-keeping
• Also: participation and action research
Informing design
• The ‘correct’ approach:
•
•
•
•
Ethnographer conducts studies
Ethnographer relates findings to designers
Designers come back with questions
Ethnographer does further studies, etc.
• The field usability testing approach:
• Ship the product or prototype
• Find a study site
• Gather data about design faults, report back
• Can we do better?
• The diary study option.