Design Proposal

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic Research

Throughout the year, I have been incorporating graphic ethnography within my work, through the use of drawings and model making, to discern the experiences, thoughts and feelings of those who I have interviewed. Ethnography, as defined by the Britannica is “descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study.” (Britannica, 2022) We can use many different methods of recording the information of people, places and things, however, the representation of information that is being portrayed needs to be appropriate to gain a full understanding of the message that is being conveyed. Sarah Pink discusses how people are able to communicate through drawings to represent aspects of their experiences that “cannot be recounted verbally, whether that has involved a journey into one’s own self, to another country and culture, or to a super natural level of one’s own world.” (Pink, Kurti and Afonso, 2005) Through the interviews of participants, I have found that taking their stories, experiences and feelings of the area, and turning it into artwork has allowed me to understand these people and their community, through both a mutual and an individual means of expression.