Summary Paper by Dourish

During the development of different intellectual disciplines there has been a certain way in which they conform to some kind of similar approach. The same goes for the scientific discipline and HCI in particular; conventions exist in the way in which we conduct and document research. When it comes to ethnographical studies meeting HCI it is very common for the ethnographical field results to be solely used as a way for finding “implications for design”. This is a misperception of the value of ethnographical studies, since it misses where ethnographic inquiry can provide major insight and benefit for HCI research (p. 542).

Ethnography is a sub discipline of anthropology, which itself arose during the colonial era of the Western civilization during the nineteenth century. Anthropology was mainly concerned with the activities of the cultures it studied, while ethnography focused on what the members of the culture actually experienced while acting the way they did. This was accomplished through daily participation in everyday life [p. 542]. Over the years ethnography proved to be useful to a number of different disciplines. For HCI it provided insight into the real-world, offering a description to the way in which technology was actually being used, through a number of different field techniques for collecting and organizing data (p. 543).

The thing is that ethnographic methods are purely seen as a methodological approach from which designers can deduct “implications for design”. By doing this, the actual theoretical and analytic value of ethnographic analysis is blocked and the way it provides benefit for HCI research is missed. The ethnographer is seen as a channel which conveys the observations to how they can be used in design, while it is so much more that has to be taken into account. It must be recognized that the gathered ethnographic data is a result of an encounter of the ethnographer with the subject under a specific setting and an analysis of the data with this in mind is what ethnography actually is.
Seeing the social discipline of ethnography merely as a way to pave a path towards design puts it away as less important and secondary to the scientific disciplines it is used for. Also, since the users of the eventual technologies are the actual creators of the meaning the technologies will have in practice, ethnography can be seen as a way to research how those technologies take on specific social meanings through their embedding within systems of practice (p. 546).

Ethnography has two ways of contributing; on an empirical level and on an analytic level. The empirical level describes the actual happenings while the analytic level encompasses the way in which something useful can be said about these happenings. The key is to find a connection to design at the analytic level instead of the empirical one. That is, to be able to appropriately compare methods and assess results (p. 548). As ethnography may play a large part in uncovering constraints and implications for design, it has an evenly great role in the way it shapes research and strategy. It provides a way of thinking.