Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011.

Abstract

While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most prevalent contemporary form of mobile technology use. In this paper we document ethnographic work studying a remote Mexican village’s use of cellphones alongside conventional phones, shared phones and the Internet. While few homes in the village we studied have running water, many children have iPods and the Internet cafe in the closest town is heavily used to access YouTube, Wikipedia, and MSN messenger. Alongside cost, the Internet fits into the communication patterns and daily routines in a way that cellphones do not. We document the variety of communication strategies that balance cost, availability and complexity. Instead of finding that new technologies replace old, we find that different technologies co-exist, with fixed telephones co-existing with instant message, cellphones and shared community phones. The paper concludes by discussing how we can study mobile technology and design for settings defined by cost and infrastructure availability.

Download paper (alternate link)

(via MobileActive)

Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in which bots themselves relate to the world”. Geiger believes that constructing and relating an emic account of the non-human should be the ultimate challenge for ethnography but that he’s getting an absurd amount of pushback from it.” He explains why in this fascinating account of what it means to study the culture of robots.

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In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia:

“Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of contemporary corporate life clearly and reasonably demands shorter time horizons for any research project. It is more than obvious that time differs in academia.”

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Sam Ladner’s post lead to an extensive discussion on anthrodesign, with contributions by such people as Uday Dandavate, Tricia Wang and Melissa Cefkin.

In Part 2, Sam will discuss how corporate ethnographers can avoid compromising research.

Two interesting posts by Danish photographer and visual ethnographer Jacob Langvad Nilsson:

Business ethnography as a key strategy for international brands
When penetrating new markets, two critical mistakes seem to repeat themselves. The first mistake involves thinking that because it is already a big and recognizable brand, its potential consumers will be overwhelmingly impressed when the products becomes available in a new market. The second mistake is for the business to think that solely relying on macro-economic data and quantitative research methods will suffice to understand the aspirations and needs of its consumers.
If a brand builds its consumer insight on data derived from an endless list of questions, it will help little more than to re-affirm pre-conceived notions. Fortunately today, smart brand executives are becoming increasingly aware of the potential value in a more thorough use of ethnographic research. A meaningful market research today is build on immersive studies combining participant-observations with social behavior analyses to build a holistic understanding of the consumer based on patterns of behavior.

Business ethnography: the new middle-class consumer
What does a modern, informed teenager from São Paulo have in common with his New York counterpart? Probably more than with another teenager from his own country but from a smaller city like Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas and Brazil’s seventh largest city. Ethnographic studies show that culture and consumer behavior across the world capitals are more comparable than within a country’s capital and its second- and third-tier cities. This does not suggest that the average, middle-class teenager from Manaus has everything in common with another from a place like Hyderabad (India), Chongqing (China), or Krasnoyarsk (Russia). However, it does imply that they are all witnessing an incredible economic development of their countries, and together, with the rest of their generation, they are in fact the driving force behind it.

Applying Anthropology in the Global Village
Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp.
Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5)
Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2)

The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such as translocality and ethnoscape to solve pressing human problems?

In this book, leading scholar/practitioners survey the development of different subfields over at least two decades, then offer concrete case studies to show how they have incorporated and refined new concepts and methods.

After an introduction synthesizing anthropological practice, key theoretical concepts, and ethnographic methods, chapters examine the arenas of public health, community development, finance, technology, transportation, gender, environment, immigration, aging, and child welfare.

An innovative guide to joining dynamic theoretical concepts with on-the-ground problem solving, this book will be of interest to practitioners from a wide range of disciplines who work on social change, as well as an excellent addition to graduate and undergraduate courses.

In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research:

“To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the company, had them join forces with outside consultants, and dispatched them in small teams to shadow girls and interview their families over a period of months in Germany, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.” [...]

Lego won’t say how much it spent on its anthropology, but research went on for months and shattered many of the assumptions that had led the company astray. You could say a worn-out sneaker saved Lego. “We asked an 11-year-old German boy, ‘what is your favorite possession?’ And he pointed to his shoes. But it wasn’t the brand of shoe that made them special,” says Holm, who heads up the Lego Concept Lab, its internal skunkworks. “When we asked him why these were so important to him, he showed us how they were worn on the side and bottom, and explained that his friends could tell from how they were worn down that he had mastered a certain style of riding, even a specific trick.”

The skate maneuvers had taken hours and hours to perfect, defying the consensus that modern kids don’t have the attention span to stick with painstaking challenges, especially during playtime. To compete with the plug-and-play quality of computer games, Lego had been dumbing down its building sets, aiming for faster “builds” and instant gratification. From the German skateboarder onward, Lego saw it had drawn the wrong lessons from computer games. Instead of focusing on their immediacy, the company now noticed how kids responded to the scoring, ranking, and levels of play—opportunities to demonstrate mastery. So while it didn’t take a genius or months of research to realize it might be a good idea to bring back the police station or fire engine that are at the heart of Lego’s most popular product line (Lego City), the “anthros” informed how the hook-and-ladder or motorcycle cop should be designed, packaged, and rolled out.”

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One way to overcome this, she argues, is for ethnographers to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value.

This is one of the reasons why she values and loves learning from designers because they are experts at visualizing their process.

Read article

Dianna talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.”

Dianna Miller is professor and program coordinator for the Service Design BFA/MFA program at Savannah College of Art & Design. She has twenty years experience as an interaction designer, user researcher, project manager, and content strategist. In 2003, she completed studies at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Read interview

Ginsberg was a Clinton/Kerry campaign manager and a researcher at Penn Schoen. Salvador was the first ethnographer to join Intel.

The combination of demographics with social, neurological and market research gives Intel insights into product design as well as customer targeting.

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It was part of the MCHA project (Minimum Configuration – Home Automation) that focused on IT solutions that help to optimise and reduce energy consumption in homes.

“This guide is a presentation of the results of a qualitative user study of patterns in user needs, motivations and barriers in relation to energy consumption and willingness to change consumption behaviour. The objective is to develop an energy control unit for the home which will help users to understand and control their energy consumption and ultimately encourage them to change consumption habits.

The guide contains a presentation of the MchA project, a project funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency, and the user involvement methods applied during the project. A result of the user study is for example the definition of four ‘user profiles’ and 11 relevant themes that are interrelated. In this guide we have decided to refer to these themes as ‘user voices’ because they express the different motivations, needs and barries that are at play in a more or less conscious inner dialogue in the users before he or she takes action. These motivations and barriers open a window of opportunity for an energy control unit. At the back of each user voice card, you will find details and recommendations for an energy control unit.

The recommendations are not exhaustive, and the intention is that different readers should contribute additional opportunities, depending on the context in which the cards are used.

The guide can be read from one end to the other. It can also be used as an easy-to-read tool that provides an insight into relevant themes in the users’ consumption behaviours. The guide is meant as an inspiration on how to respond to several user voices and user profiles at the same time and thus reflect on how these different and often conflicting user voices influence consumption behaviours in the home.”

Download guide

What is the soul of the new machine?

This isn’t a design or product question. It’s a philosophical question. What is this thing? What is it supposed to do? How will it do it? How do we get there? [...]

This question sparked deep user studies at Google on mobile phone use, what Matias described as “Serious baseline ethnographic research which hadn’t happened before.” He tells me that the company spent a great deal of time and effort watching how and why regular people used their smartphones. Not just Android phones, but all smartphones. The company even had employees “shadow” users, visiting them at their homes and workplaces to watch how they interacted with their devices. Matias wouldn’t share numbers, but intimated that the study was a significant undertaking.

“A lot of what we found confirmed what I thought for years. At Danger, we had this idea that smartphones were not for a certain kind of person. They were for everyone. Smartphones were the way phones were supposed to be.”

“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love these things [smartphones], they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”

“With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.”

Matias says that the studies showed that users felt empowered by their devices, but often found Android phones overly complex. That they needed to invest more time in learning the phones, more time in becoming an expert. The phones also made users feel more aware of their limitations — they knew there was more they could do with the device, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock that power.

Read interview

(summary article)

This paper discusses how the notion and practice of ethnography differs for practitioners with different disciplinary backgrounds, especially in a context where ethnography exits academia to enter industry contexts. The paper is divided into four sections. The first provides background to specific experiences and briefly over-views existing literature. In the second part we compare our experiences through an industry case study. The third section proposes a taxonomy, suggesting a number of implications, and providing recommendations on how to integrate cross-disciplinary approaches to expand the scope of conducting user research. The final section wraps up our propositions and provides a number of recommendations.

(via Nicolas Nova)

“Dori Tunstall is a Design Anthropologist, meaning she tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it mean to be human. Design Anthropology argues that by taking into account how others see and experience the world differently, products and services can be designed that work with people and nature rather than disrupt them.

Dori is an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia as well as Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Design.”

Listen to audio

“Ultimately, my team’s role is about making sure the product development processes start from an understanding of what people care about when it comes to technology.

And that as an organisation, we are literally testing our silicon against that ideal at each and every step of the way.”

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They contain drafts of papers and workshop abstracts, and photos and abstracts from Pecha Kuchas and Artifacts.

Print proceedings will be mailed to conference participants and will be available through Anthrosource from October 21.

Download draft proceedings (pdf, 385 pages)

The Helsinki Design Lab (an entity within Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund) has created a Design Ethnography Field Guide which is a booklet that participants of the HDL Studios use when venturing into the field to see the reality of a system as it is lived and experienced on the ground. It is intended to be the minimal starting point for this kind of activity. They supplement this document with group discussions to prepare participants and adjust the booklet as needed in different situations.

The download page also contains some other resources that may be a useful starting point.

And obviously more resources can be found on this very blog.

Q: You mention Ethnographic analysis – what do you mean by that?
The Ethnographic method is scientific, integrating both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Field work is fundamental to “the doing of ethnography” by anthropologists of all descriptions. Traditionally, anthropologists have identified with peoples amongst whom they reside, and, inevitably, this identification is reflected in ethnographic methods which primarily seek to privilege the world views of people and their life experiences. It involves an in-depth study of human behaviour, the choices and values that guide people’s everyday lives in their natural settings, how they interact within economic, religious, political, geographic worlds that are expressed through their cultural repertoires, in their own words.

Q: How would you describe participant observation?
Participant observation is not so much a method, but an approach to collecting information by means of the presence and the participation of the researcher. There are many degrees of participant observation – the fundamental approach that informed this ethnographic research was the method of immersion. The process of ‘immersion’ in the field by the researchers indicates committed long-term residence and polite engagement with the local communities — forming sets of relationships and activities, which are connected to the wider society. Participation is seen as an apprenticeship, as a learning process through which the researchers and their personal relationships serve as primary vehicles for eliciting findings and thoughts; relationships of intimacy and familiarity, between researcher and subject, are envisioned as a fundamental medium of investigation, rather than as an extraneous by-product, or even as an impediment. Most of the time, it is the people who tell the ethnographer what is to be done, rather than being told what they should do. Thus, one gets to grips with what people really need, whether it is clean water, or seeds for crops and so forth.”

Read interview

Synopsis

The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such as translocality and ethnoscape to solve pressing human problems? In this book, leading scholar/practitioners survey the development of different subfields over at least two decades, then offer concrete case studies to show how they have incorporated and refined new concepts and methods. After an introduction synthesizing anthropological practice, key theoretical concepts, and ethnographic methods, chapters examine the arenas of public health, community development, finance, technology, transportation, gender, environment, immigration, aging, and child welfare. An innovative guide to joining dynamic theoretical concepts to on-the-ground problem solving, this book is also an excellent addition to graduate and undergraduate courses.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
1. Public Health in Global Localities: Managing Infectious Disease, Mary Odell Butler
2. Transportation and Infrastructure: Culture on the Move, Mari Clarke
3. Community Development in Globalizing Cities: Housing and Finance, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
4. Sex Trafficking: Feminist Anthropological Practice, Susan Dewey
5. Climate Change and the Global Environment, Shirley J. Fiske
6. International Migration and Aging, Madelyn Iris
7. Neoliberalism and the Privatization of Social Services, Susan Racine Passmore
8. Internationalism and Systems Thinking in Community and Public Health, Eve C. Pinsker
9. Localizing the Global in Technology Design, Susan Squires and Christina Wasson
Conclusion: Globalization, Community Research, and the Politics of Science, Jean J. Schensul
Index
About the Authors

Ken Banks adds some further reflection to the matter, and thinks the book is a must-read “for anyone interested in how anthropology can be usefully applied in the modern world.

“The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project — a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses — [...] enlisted two anthropologists, along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods.

One thing the librarians now know is that their students’ research habits are worse than they thought.

At Illinois Wesleyan University, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources. [...]

The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)”

- Read article [Inside HigherEd]
- Same article [USA Today]

(via BoingBoing)

A first focus is on France and Rebecca talks with Caroline Baker, founder and managing director of European Market Research Associates (EMRA). Born and raised in the U.K., Caroline is a top-notch qualitative researcher who moderates in both French and English, and in the interview she explores some of the language and cultural issues she has observed over the past 28 years that she has been living and working in France.

A recommended read.

Part 1 | Part 2