Responsibilities and implications: further thoughts on ethnography and design

ABSTRACT

Many researchers and practitioners in user experience design have turned towards social sciences to find ways to understand the social contexts in which both users and technologies are embedded. Ethnographic approaches are increasingly prominent as means by which this might be accomplished. However, a very wide range of forms of social investigation travel under the "ethnography" banner in HCI, suggesting that there is still considerable debate over what ethnography is and how it can best be employed in design contexts.

Building on earlier discussions and debates around ethnography and its implications, this paper explores how ethnographic methods might be consequential for design. In particular, it illustrates the implications for design that might be derived from classical ethnographic material and shows that these may not be of the form that HCI research normally imagines or expects.

REFERENCES

• 1: Abu-Lughod, A. 2000. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
• 2: Kirsten Boehner , Rogério DePaula , Paul Dourish , Phoebe Sengers, Affect: from information to interaction, Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility, August 20-24, 2005, Aarhus, Denmark [doi>10.1145/1094562.1094570]
• 3: Johanna Brewer , Scott Mainwaring , Paul Dourish, Aesthetic journeys, Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems, p.333-341, February 25-27, 2008, Cape Town, South Africa [doi>10.1145/1394445.1394481]
• 4: Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
• 5: Cresswell, T. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge.
• 6: Paul Dourish, Implications for design, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1124772.1124855]
• 7: Hill, R. 1995. Blackfellas and Whitefellas: Aboriginal Land Rights, The Mabo Decision, and the Meaning of Land. Human Rights Quarterly, 17(2), 303--322.
• 8: Keesing, R. 1974. Theories of Culture. Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 3, 73--97.
• 9: Lutz, C. 1986. Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category. Cultural Anthropology, 1(3), 287--309.
• 10: Lutz, C. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on an Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 11: Malkki, L. 1992. National Geographic: The Rootedness of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Amongst Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 24--44.
• 12: Malkki, L. 1995. Purity and Exile: Memory and National Cosmology amongst Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago.
• 13: Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95--117.
• 14: Munn, N. 1996. Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape. Critical Inquiry, 22(3), 446--465.
• 15: Myers, F. 1979. Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order amongst Pintupi Aboriginals. Ethos, 7(4), 343--370.
• 16: Norman, D. 2004. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
• 17: Ortner, S. 1984. Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), 126--166.
• 18: Rosalind W. Picard, Affective computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997
• 19: Rosaldo, M. 1983. The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of Self. Ethos, 11(3), 135--151.
• 20: Smith, B. C. 1996. On the Origin of Objects. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• 21: Turnbull, D. 2000. Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. Amsterdam: Harwood.
• 22: Verran, H. 1998. Re-imagining Land Ownership in Australia. Postcolonial Studies, 1(2), 237--254.
• 23: Yengoyan, A. 1986. Theory in Anthropology: The Demise of the Concept of Culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28(2), 368--374.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
affective computing, design, ethnography, methodology, mobility, ubiquitous computing