Implications for Design

Dourish, P. 2006. Implications for Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2006 (Montreal, Canada).

Often ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems developments. Dourish suggests that “implication for design” may not be the best metric for evaluation and may fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

The term “ethnography,” indeed, is often used as shorthand for investigations that are, to some extent, in situ, qualitative, or open-ended. Similarly, the term is often used to encompass particular formulations of qualitative research methods such as Contextual Inquiry (Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. 1997. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan Kaufman.).

This view of ethnography as purely methodological and instrumental supports the idea that “implications for design” are the sole output of ethnographic investigation.

and argues this way

In this way, the domain of technology and the domain of everyday experience cannot be separated from each other; they are mutually constitutive. The role of ethnography, then, cannot be to mediate between these two domains, because ethnography does not accept their conceptual separation in the first place.

What I have tried to argue here is that a bullet list of design implications formulated by an ethnographer is not the most effective or appropriate method. Ethnography provides insight into the organization of social settings, but its goal is not simply to save the reader a trip; rather, it provides models for thinking about those settings and the work that goes on there.

More than the discussion on ethnology I got really interested on the discussion of the social-techical gap introduced by Ackerman, M. 2000. The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 179-203. and how people adapt to technologies.

Ackerman critiques the intuition that people adopt and adapt technologies because the technologies are poorly designed, and that better designed technologies would obviate the need for such adaptation and appropriation.

Certainly, though, what it does is to refigure “users” not as passive recipients of predefined technologies but as actors who collectively create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use. HCI research has, of course, long had an interest in aspects of the ways in which people might configure, adapt, and customize technologies

Reference to read:
Ackerman, M. 2000. The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 179-203.

Relation to my thesis: I am trying to understand in what ways ethnology can be applied (or not!) in my research and how I can make the output of my thesis go beyond a bullet list of implication for design of ubicomp environements. I discovered Ackermann’s vision of people adapting to technologies and that technologies can be badly designed in order to be adapted and then appropriated. This goes in the direction I see the relation between technology and people. Imperfect, non-flat, anti-seemless technology can be good for appropriation. The positive sides of imperfect technology.