Design Studies

Ethnographic Studies

IMAGE 3 / Ethnographic works as a kind of technological apparatus
studies of culture, systems,
and technical practice are,
in fact, a core element in
the education and practice

of all designers.

for coordinating and communicating the
distributed knowledge and expertise of the
crew such that they can collectively accomplish
the tasks of steering and navigation.

The situation with a ship is not unlike other
kinds of human organizations. Corporations,
hospitals, universities, laboratories, municipal
governments, and the rest, represent complex
organizations that bring together persons of
massively different skill sets and experience
around common projects, physical and
technological environments, and institutional
identities. It is in this sense that any specific
design—whether of a building, an artifact,

a communication system, or a process—
needs to address the conditions of its own
embeddedness within this larger context of
culturally distributed knowledge and expertise.

CONCLUSION /

My aim in this brief essay has been to give
some initial sense of how cultural analysis is

embedded in our routine social activities and to
begin to imagine the implications this holds for

ethnography, as well as for our understanding
of the relationship between ethnography and
design. My central argument has been that
professional ethnography is, in its own right, a
culturally embedded practice that draws upon

pre-existing resources for learning and cultural
understanding that are always already present
in the social settings and cultural practices
ethnographers are seeking to comprehend.
Further, I have argued that the relevance of
ethnography for design consists at the very
least in the ability of cultural analysis to

draw attention to the depth and complexity of
socially distributed knowledge and expertise in
contemporary organizations, and, one might
say, in contemporary social and cultural life.

As I was writing this essay, I attended a
gathering organized by the City of Vancouver
called the “Cities Summit,”[14] where the
mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, told a
story about what he described as the “best
investment in open technology” ever made by
his administration. As one of their initiatives
in open information government, the City of
Calgary equipped every snow-plow truck with
GPS and developed an application that would
provide the locational data of all the plows

to the city’s public website. Not only did this
almost eliminate phone calls to the City to
find out when the streets would be plowed, it
changed the way that people organized their
days and their traffic patterns in the aftermath
of snowstorms.

Although not world-changing, it is an excellent
example of how a specific technological
intervention can be used to mobilize the
massively distributed intelligence of a city and
its citizens. It is well worth noting that this

“design solution” did not come from the city

planners or the IT people, it came from the
maintenance department.

CITATIONS

[1] Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in
Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

[2] Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka (eds.), Participatory Design: Principles
and Practices (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993).

[3] Donald A. Norman and Stephen W. Draper, User Centered System Design
(New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986); Terry Winograd and
Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (New Jersey:
Ablex Publishers, 1986); Brenda Laurel (ed.), Design Research: Method and
Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Bill Moggridge, Designing
Interactions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

[4] Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-
Centered Systems (San Francisco: Morgan Kauffman Publishers, 1998).

[5] Colin Burns, Hilary Cottam, Chris Vanstone, and Jennie

Winhall, “Red Paper 02: Transformation Design,” Design Council,
February 2006 (www.designcouncil.cino/wt/RED/tranformation/
Transformation DesignFinalDraft.pdf)

[6] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice (trans.)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

[7] Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem or Human-Machine
Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Graham
Button (ed.), Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and
Technology (London: Routledge, 1993)

[8] Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation:
Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay,” in John
Law (ed.) Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London:
Routledge, 1986), pp. 196-229; Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).

[9] “2009 Conditions for Accreditation,” National Architectural Accrediting
Board, pp. 20-22 (http://www.naab.org/accreditation/2009_Conditions.aspx)
[io] http://www.aiga.org/ethnography-primer/

[11] This is an allusion to Geertz’s concept of “thick” descriptions, or
ethnographic accounts that attend to the local contextual conditions of
human social behavior. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (New York: Basic books, 1973).

[12] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 18.

[13] Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
[14] http://www.vancouvercitiessummit.org/