Thanks! The interesting information is: there are some designer types doing some stuff around âethnographyâ (it seems that what they do is really user workshops, âethnographic methodsâ at best rather than full-on ethnography). This is a signal that ethnography is âhotâ and âhypeyâ, which is both good and bad news.
For future reference: if you find something interesting and want to share it, I recommend to:
- share it publicly, not with a private message. Your information might be important to someone you do not know.
- Add some reflections of your own: why you think this is important, etc. It could guide your readerâs decisions on whether they want to invest time in reading the full piece, and what they would look for.
Are you OK with me moving this thread to a public space?
sure thing, go ahead. I found it interesting because of the combination with âsprintsâ from Agile Methodology btw. So happy to comment that when it is in a public space. tnx, Ro
Design ethnography has ineed been hot and hypey for a few years now (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (âEPICâ) conference is a good way to keep your finger on this pulse https://www.epicpeople.org/).
For what itâs worth, that conference gets a lot of hate in the academic anthropology circles, in part for the same reason as Iâd hate on this method â itâs just not ethnography if itâs not long-term, because you need long-term engagement to fully immerse yourself in the worldview of the people youâre studying and to have the time to unravel both your own and their unspoken assumptions about how things work. You need time to develop ideas about whatâs going on and then put those ideas up to be challenged by your participants. As @alberto says, at best you can call these design methods âethnographic methods.â
Rather than taking the path of hating hard on this kind of thing, I take it as a good sign that people are interested in peopleâs subjective and qualitative experience. But itâs important to be clear on the limitations of a short-term approach. Sarah Pink is an academic who supports this short term ethno, but I donât fully agree with her arguments (and itâs still not super, super short-term). You have to find a way to acquire depth and nuance, and time is generally the best way to do that.
One answer could be the direction weâre going in, though â layer multiple ethnographersâ perspectives, working at the same time. Then you have the kind of back-and-forth challenge you need to make sure youâre not staying on the surface. I always thought suuuper long-term fieldwork was overly fetishized, particularly done by individual researchers, but I donât think these short, short sprints are the answer. And, perhaps unsurprisingly as these are usually for-profit industry applications, they are often highly extractive (so, ethically questionable).