Learning Media and Technology conference article

Ethnography and Design This paper concentrates on the role of ethnographic methods in order to stimulate debate on the ways in which deeper understandings of the full context within an individual institution can be used to develop more generally useful design principles. This lays emphasis on particular styles of ethnography that can be seen as directed rather than the view of traditional ethnography as ‘hanging about’. Often ethnography is used for examining situations from a critical standpoint such as Star’s work on infrastructure (1999) or from psychological perspectives such as the situatedness of cognitive activity (Suchman 1994). I am arguing that there is an additional use for ethnography in the area of design based research.

I would suggest that the naturalistic approach to data collection places ethnographic methods at the heart of an analytical contradiction. If the traditional definition of ethnography is accepted then the outcomes of ethnographic work are highly situated and not generalisable. In his seminal critique of ethnography Hammersley points out that one of ethnography’s aims is to produce theoretical descriptions, but that such descriptions cannot be theoretical as, “they represent objects and events in particular space‐time locations; whereas theories are about types of phenomena, wherever their instances occur” (Hammersley 1992, p27).

However, the use of such context‐dependent ethnographic methods in developing generalised design principles is a long recognised practice in socio‐technical systems analysis and computer systems development (see e.g. Clancey 1993). Design principles are the abstracted essence of a designed system and provide the mechanism whereby effective design can be carried across contexts without losing the elements that make it useful. A meta‐design‐principle would be that design principles must be applicable within a problem domain.

It cannot be true that ethnography is not generalisable and merely provides interesting, though essentially useless (from a theory generation standpoint) ‘thick description’ while at the same time providing the material for design principles. In various fields of knowledge including economics (Ostrom 2000), library and information science (Crabtree, Nichols et al. 2000) , and architecture (Memmott, Hyde et al. 2009) ethnography is being used as a key component in the development of new knowledge in the form of design principles. Recent work in the field of health sciences research has also recognised the need to move beyond positivist approaches to studies of technology (Greenhalgh and Swinglehurst) .

In the worlds of computer supported collaborative work and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCW/ CSCL) the use of ethnography is also widely mentioned (see e.g. Harper 2000) as are design based approaches (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1994) but rarely are the two combined in such a way as to assist researchers in ensuring persistency of their innovation even where the issue is recognised and the researchers are aware that, ”descriptive research is required to set the stage for principled interventions” (Hoadley and Pea 2002). ‘Principled’ is used here to mean an intervention that is appropriated and used by the community it is designed for, rather than being a research tool with no life beyond the project within which it is used.

In her seminal paper on design experiments in education Ann Brown highlights how useful ethnographic methods are in understanding how and why her cognitive experiments have provided evidence of positive change. In the summing up of problems faced by design based researchers she