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n 1998 Gary Fine, Leslie Salzinger and Christena Nippert-Eng, sociology
professors at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and
Illinois Institute of Technology respectively, decided that ethnography
students needed a conference. They intended to keep the gathering informal
while giving students an opportunity to share their work with one another.
Nippert-Eng suggested that the conference
should include design students from IIT’s Institute of Design. This seemed
like a curious move, but an invitation was graciously extended to the
design students, who were told they were welcome to come if they thought
it would benefit them.
According to Nippert-Eng, the Conference
on Ethnography was not a “rational joining of people within specific
disciplines” but an inclusive event that supported and promoted ethnography.
This year’s conference, organized and hosted by students at the Institute
of Design, tested that proposition more than any other year. During the
first three years, the conference ran smoothly. Each year a different
school volunteered to host the event, and a student committee from the
host school oversaw the organizational details. They often divided student
presentations by subject matter to create more cohesive sessions. This
isolated the design students’ presentations, limiting them to sessions
on practical and applied ethnology.
The design students on this year’s conference
planning committee weren’t content with their past experiences and decided
try a new route. Carlos Teixeira, one of the organizers, wanted to “create
a dialogue between ethnography students and design students by having
them see and discuss each other’s research.” To facilitate this goal
they made several changes. Rick Robinson from Sapient and sociologists Howard
Becker and Mitchell Stevens were invited to be keynote speakers. The students
organized multi-disciplinary student sessions instead of thematic
ones. They also set aside an hour at the end of the day for corporate
sessions to explore how corporations are applying ethnographic methods
in their daily professional activities.
On February 23, 2002, approximately 150
people attended the 4th Annual Conference on Ethnography-nearly double
any prior year’s attendance. The academic participants ranged from
the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Loyola University,
Depaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design,
Western Michigan University and the University of Illinois-Chicago. The
day was split into two parts: the morning was dedicated to keynote speakers
followed by an afternoon of student presentations. Unlike previous years,
when design students’ presentations were isolated, sociology and design
presentations were mixed at a four to one ratio.
The conscious union of professional design
and ethnography is a relatively new phenomenon. While academics in the social sciences such as Edward T. Hall and Robert Sommer conducted research that was of interest to designers, and designers such as Henry Dreyfuss and William Stumpf used field work to inform their design, terms like user observation, user research, and ethnography didn't become part of the design lexicon until the early 1990's. When
Rick Robinson from the University of Chicago and John Cane from the Institute
of Design formed E-Lab in 1994, it represented a symbolic partnership
between ethnography and design. Later, companies such as IDEO and Fitch
took this relationship to another level: they used field work not
only as a part of their methodology but also as a way to brand and sell
their own image.
Supported by a plethora of articles from
The Harvard Business Review about the “experience economy,”
methodologies once reserved for the social sciences gained a distinctly corporate flavor.
As design firms entered the Internet boom and worked closely with large
corporations and consultancies, the language of ethnography tunred into
buzz phrases such as “user experience.” Soon everyone claimed
to be an ethnographer. Ethnography took on a context that professionals
had a hard time defining.
As Rick Robinson took the floor to begin
his keynote speech, many attendees familiar with Robinson’s views expected
a discussion on the points where ethnography converged and diverged with
design practice. Instead his address to the mixed audience resembled a
public soul-searching.
Robinson shared text from an e-mail dialogue
with fellow ethnographers working in the corporate arena. He asked how
they defined their unique area of expertise, starting with ways in which
their work differed from market research. One ethnographer said, “The
purpose is to produce a framework not to exhaustively describe something.”
Another added “Primary data is not privileged; interpretations are.”
And a third: “The locus of expertise is in the team and
in the process.” His colleagues seemed to agree: they
provided their corporate clients with a deeper understanding of human
values and beliefs. Someone in the audience asked, “Do you encounter
ethical issues doing corporate ethnography?”
Robinson suggested that, by better understanding
people’s needs and values, products could be designed to fit into everyday
human activity. He flipped to a slide showing one of his researchers conducting
an interview with a woman seated in a cafe and talked about research to
understand why women shave. His argued that, by making products better,
corporations improved the experience of daily activities. By extension,
the work of ethnographers in design improved on the traditional marketing
practice of hyping desire. The juxtaposition of his stance on the virtue
of corporate ethnography and the lingering image of a woman shaving her
legs, however, seemed a bit absurd.
Overall feedback about the conference organizers’
efforts to facilitate a dialogue between the two disciplines was primarily
positive. However, there were also some feverishly negative reactions.
A few attendees’ boycotted the corporate sessions; others threatened
to boycott future conferences.
Some attendees were concerned that mixing
design student presentations with sociology student presentations made
coherent discussions impossible. Others appeared unwilling to think of
ethnography being used in any context outside of academics. They interpreted
the corporate sessions as “corporate sponsorship” and used words
like “inappropriate,” “insulting” and “irresponsible”
in their responses to the conference’s feedback survey. One respondent
commented that the sessions represented a “complete disconnect between
ethnography as a form of social science research and ethnography as a
tool for corporate product development.”
In striking contrast to these attitudes,
University of Chicago sociology professor Andreas Glaeser overwhelmingly
supported the conference’s different perspective. He viewed the Institute
of Design’s contribution as a “real enrichment” and said that
it is good for all students to see what happens “outside the academy.”
Professor Glaeser, though, quickly pointed out the distinction between
using ethnography for marketing purposes and using ethnography to design
genuinely better products, services, and communication.
Not everybody believes that using ethnography
in design links it automatically to corporate profit. For example, students
at the Institute of Design use ethnography to improve conditions that
normally fall under public policy and government legislation. A team of
students last year conducted research in civil courts to create design
concepts that improved the way self-represented litigants accessed the
justice system.
In his keynote speech, Mitchell Stevens,
who studied under Howard Becker at Northwestern University, advised budding
sociologists to choose important and meaningful topics when looking for
things to research. He listed politics, religion, energy consumption and
aging as four areas that he felt were rich topics for deeper investigation,
as opposed to some of the more whimsical topics sociology students sometimes
pursue.
That sociologists and designers don’t yet
see eye to eye on the use of ethnography should not come as a big surprise.
What is surprising is that, given the rare opportunity to bring these
parties together, the conference has not yet offered dedicated sessions
with topics such as ethics in ethnography or ethnography and the design
of public policy—topics which would invite discussion about the ways
these issues work together. By using ethnography to address tough social
issues, common ground is created for ethnography and design to work together,
without self-consciousness or guilt.
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...the Conference
on Ethnography was not a “rational joining of people within specific
disciplines” but an inclusive event that supported and promoted ethnography.
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