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Positioning Ethnography within Participatory Design
Abstract
In this article we focus attention on ethnography's place in CSCW by reflecting on how ethnography in the context of CSCW has contributed to our understanding of the sociality and materiality of work and by exploring how the notion of the 'field site' as a construct in ethnography provides new ways of conceptualizing 'work' that extends beyond the workplace. We argue that the well known challenges of drawing design implications from ethnographic research have led to useful strategies for tightly coupling ethnography and design. We also offer some thoughts on recent controversies over what constitutes useful and proper ethnographic research in the context of CSCW. Finally, we argue that as the temporal and spatial horizons of inquiry have expanded, along with new domains of collaborative activity, ethnography continues to provide invaluable perspectives.
... That is, in practice, many participatory approaches may extract the input of stakeholders for goals not defined by or even necessarily shared with those stakeholders [12,16,20,54,54,98,147,164,180,203,215]. Additionally, critics have noted that researchers and practitioners have difficulty putting aside their own notions of what the design should be and what the intervention should look like, thus blocking possible new avenues for change originating from stakeholders' ideas [29]. Design processes in which stakeholders are only selecting or evaluating predefined choices have been described as forms of "pseudo-participation" [164,180] in which stakeholders lack agency in decision-making and agenda setting in the design process [31,37,170]. ...
... The practice of relying on UX/HCI professionals as mediators has long been critiqued in the PD [29,58,141] and HCI [23,56] literature. In particular, leveraging 'proxy users' or 'user surrogates,' may undermine the rich experiential knowledge that participants have about their contexts and practices. ...
Despite the growing consensus that stakeholders affected by AI systems should participate in their design, enormous variation and implicit disagreements exist among current approaches. For researchers and practitioners who are interested in taking a participatory approach to AI design and development, it remains challenging to assess the extent to which any participatory approach grants substantive agency to stakeholders. This article thus aims to ground what we dub the "participatory turn" in AI design by synthesizing existing theoretical literature on participation and through empirical investigation and critique of its current practices. Specifically, we derive a conceptual framework through synthesis of literature across technology design, political theory, and the social sciences that researchers and practitioners can leverage to evaluate approaches to participation in AI design. Additionally, we articulate empirical findings concerning the current state of participatory practice in AI design based on an analysis of recently published research and semi-structured interviews with 12 AI researchers and practitioners. We use these empirical findings to understand the current state of participatory practice and subsequently provide guidance to better align participatory goals and methods in a way that accounts for practical constraints.
... Another challenge is to establish an environment for mutual learning. In PD, the activities that directly engage participants in the design are in the foreground, while understanding and learning becomes a natural part of the design work [22]. In contrast, ethnography starts with understanding work practices, which involves detailed workplace studies. ...
... As PD has evolved, designers have started to use techniques from ethnography to learn about current problems and work practices before they meet participants. However, it is not always clear when ethnography stops and design starts, and how designers can benefit from the contributions of ethnography [22]. ...
Active user involvement is crucial to designing a Health Information System (HIS) consistent with users’ expectations and needs. Many design projects use Participatory Design (PD), involving users as active co-designers, to promote the democratization of work and empower the workers. While this design approach has worked in local contexts, there is an open question on how to broaden participatory design to healthcare networks in need for coordinating their services for patient-centric care. In patient-centric healthcare, various providers at different healthcare levels must coordinate their actions. In this paper, we discuss different challenges when PD applies to a healthcare network and how practice-oriented approaches can contribute to mitigating these challenges.
The profound digitalization of everyday environments and the deep social, political, and economic implications of this development mean there is an urgent need for not just advancing but rethinking digital citizenship, as well as reconsidering different actors’ roles within this new order. In many societies, digital literacy already determines individuals’ possibilities to effectively function as a part of society: everyday life actions such as accessing health services and using public transport are dependent on digital literacy. However, this is just one level of the ongoing transformation. More broadly, digital technology is deeply woven into everyday practices, social interactions, cultural experiences, economic transactions, and political decision-making (Manovich 2013; Williamson 2014). This results in that digital literacy, understood mainly as a set of adequate skills that help in navigating digitalized everyday environments, needs to be accompanied by notions of broader critical awareness of technologies’ role in society. In this chapter, we explore one facet of this critical awareness: how the notion of digital citizenship could be complemented and expanded to include an ability to imagine alternative future trajectories.
As the complexity of IT systems increases, the demand for methods taking the whole work situation into account grows. The Vision Seminar (VS) process addresses the future usage of technologies in complex digital work environments. This paper describes the experiences of conducting the VS process in the context of a large IT project to improve study-administrative work. The participants and stakeholders' experiences of participating in VS workshops were studied as the effect the participants and stakeholders believed the vision might have. Data were gathered through interviews and a survey. The participants were confident that the time spent on workshops was worthwhile and that achieving the future described in the resulting vision was feasible. The stakeholders perceived the VS process as rigorous. They were happily surprised by the positive spirit and engagement displayed by the participants. The utility of the resulting vision not being obvious was the most notable weakness mentioned.
How can we invite children and young people into the design of their everyday environments in a meaningful way? How can we facilitate real collaborative decision-making processes that simultaneously are manageable and produce actual physical built results? Involving children in the design and planning of their everyday environment is a practice that has been explored and experimented with in various setups. Challenges arise when actual design-based decision-making is integrated into a real live building process with its complexities and extensive procedures. They often fall short when translating thoughts and ideas into tangible physical space. Either children’s contributions end up as sketches on a post-it note or the time gap between the design workshop and the completed built space is so extensive that it no longer seems relevant for the involved children and partners. This case study practice review presents a co-design process with a group of children that took place in the social housing estate Hørgården, Copenhagen, during spring of 2021. The paper unpacks our method testing how design decisions can be negotiated and lead to the collective design and construction of three social urban furniture. A key element is to discover if and how children felt a sense of ownership of the process and the outcome. For this, we use field notes and photo documentation along with interviews with stakeholders and children. The topics touched upon in this paper illustrate relationships between the different SDGs and their targets in a concrete community-driven co-design partnership.
This study introduces a pedagogical model: “the parallel co-inquiry cycles with performative inquiry for character related design” for higher education design studies that focus on characterization. The disciplines benefitting from cross-fertilization provided by the model include game design, fashion design, graphic design, theatre, and actor’s art. Besides the model, the article discusses curriculum integration of a shared thematic denominator Commedia dell’Arte in higher education design studies. The model synthesizes progressive inquiry, drama pedagogical methodologies, and theories on theater with hands-on art workshops to create tangible and digital knowledge vessels for characterization. The research design relies on parallel co-inquiry cycles, participatory ethnography with elements from participatory design tradition. The model identifies three major components within the single 3E-inquiry cycles, namely exercise, experiment and experience. The entire process acquires complexity as each single inquiry cycle enters the next loop of Observe–Plan–Act–Reflect and more time and resources are allocated to the process. The pattern of action and reflection has an iterative cycle format in this model. Reflection has two distinguished purposes: first, to internalize reflective design and to become a reflective practitioner. Second, to see the importance of reflection as distancing oneself from the current process, to allow a reflective mind to linger on the process and learn from mistakes to turn them into assets. Reflection as a metacognitive skill has an all-encompassing purpose in both design and learning processes. The model distinguishes two types of knowledge vessels. Knowledge objects are abstractions that condense knowledge in the co-design process, whereas knowledge artifacts are concrete items, such as masks, outfits, and accessories in both digital and tangible formats. The model connects maker-culture, practice-based inquiry, and performative inquiry in the inquiry cycles. The drama method with performative inquiry acknowledges shared knowledge building in a collaborative, dialogical inquiry that fosters both argumentative and reflection skills.
Eksperimenter bruges både i offentlige og private organisationer som en måde at håndtere problemstillinger og skabe forandringer. I den videnskabelige litteratur beskrives eksperimenter både som en vej til viden, innovation og empowerment. Udførelsen af et eksperiment i en organisationssammenhæng betyder, at eksperimentet og dets udkomme kan udvikles med specifik relevans for en given organisation. I artiklen undersøges betydningen af organisationseksperimentets grundlæggende situerede karakter for, hvad det kan tilbyde ledere og medarbejdere i en organisation på baggrund af et eksperiment i en stor dansk bank. Med dette afsæt peges på, at mens organisationseksperimentet giver mulighed for et specifikt tilpasset udkomme, så stiller dets situerede karakter også krav om opmærksomhed på oversættelse mellem deltagerne i eksperimentet og ledelsen, for at kunne indfri et eventuelt potentiale for organisationen.
Promoting resilience is crucial to support people in the face of traumatic experiences caused by existential crises. Virtual Reality (VR) can support resilience as it allows for embodied experiences and experiential learning. We present the design and initial user evaluation of an immersive VR experience for strengthening resilience, inspired by Viktor Frankl’s psychotherapy, ‘logotherapy and existential analysis’ (LTEA). The prototype immerses users in two experiences related to guilt or suffering and guides them through an interactive reflection, encouraging them to consider their potential for finding meaning even in adverse circumstances. Although the self-reported resilience measures did not indicate increased resilience, qualitative data suggest that the users were able to use the prototype to reflect on meaning in life. This paper contributes to the field of VR for well-being by introducing the under-explored approach of LTEA to facilitate resilience. We discuss aspects of resilience support in VR by addressing the relevance of identifying and utilising technology-specific affordances to enhance reflective practice and the potential of peer support for promoting resilience.KeywordsVirtual RealityResilienceReflectionExistential HCILogotherapy and Existential Analysis
We introduce a project titled as Our Shared Virtual World which aims at increasing public libraries’ capability to provide knowledge
on digital technology to general public. The practical goal of the project has been to produce a functional prototype of a virtual
reality application that could be utilized freely in all the public libraries in Finland. In many countries worldwide, libraries’ role is
expanding from providers of traditional books to providers of information technologies and related new forms of literacy, and this development provides the broader backdrop for the project. The contribution of the article is two-fold: First, we describe how an immersive virtual reality (VR) application can be collaboratively developed within this specific research context, namely within a
network of public libraries, and introduce the tangible outcome of the project, the VR application called Forest Elf. Secondly, we
scrutinize how results of such a design work can be sustained over time: through participatory design (PD), we aimed at creating
conditions which would enable public libraries to continue developing and using the artefact also after the project. We provide insights on how to tackle the challenge of research prototypes ending up being abandoned, and what factors in the context of library partnership support or hamper sustainable digital innovation – digital innovation that is inclusive and equitable but also has a long-lasting impact.
Every office is an open system, and the products of office work are the result of decentralized negotiations. Changing patterns of task organization and alliance inevitably give rise to inconsistent knowledge bases and procedures. This implies that there are no globally correct answers to problems addressed by OISs. Rather, systems must deal with multiple competing, possibly irreconcilable, solutions. Articulating alternative solutions is the problem of due process. This problem and its consequences are illustrated by a case study of a rate-setting group in a large health insurance firm. There is no formal solution to the problem of due process. But it must be solved in practice if distributed intelligent OISs are to be developed. We propose an alternative approach based on the work of social scientists concerned with analyzing analogous problems in human organization. Solution of the due process problem hinges on developing local closures to the problem faced by an organization. This means analyzing (a) local, tacit knowledge and its transfer ability; (b) articulation work, that is, reconciling incommensurate assumptions and procedures.
Traditionally, when the human sciences consider foundational issues such as epistemology and method, they do so by theorising them. Ethnomethodology, however, attempts to make such foundational matters a focus of attention, and directly enquires into them. This book reappraises the significance of ethnomethodology in sociology in particular, and in the human sciences in general. It demonstrates how, through its empirical enquiries into the ordered properties of social action, ethnomethodology provides a radical respecification of the foundations of the human sciences, an achievement that has often been misunderstood. The chapters, by leading scholars, take up the specification of action and order in theorising, logic, epistemology, measurement, evidence, the social actor, cognition, language and culture, and moral judgement, and underscore the ramifications for the human sciences of the ethnomethodologist's approach. This is a systematic and coherent collection which explicitly addresses fundamental conceptual issues. The clear exposition of the central tenets of ethnomethodology is especially welcome.
Exploring Digital Design takes a multi-disciplinary look at digital design research where digital design is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context. Working from socio-technical research areas such as Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the book explores how humanities offer new insights into digital design, and discusses a variety of digital design research practices, methods, and theoretical approaches spanning established disciplinary borders. The aim of the book is to explore the diversity of contemporary digital design practices in which commonly shared aspects are interpreted and integrated into different disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. It is the conversations and explorations with humanities that further distinguish this book within digital design research. Illustrated with real examples from digital design research practices from a variety of research projects and from a broad range of contexts Exploring Digital Design offers a basis for understanding the disciplinary roots as well as the interdisciplinary dialogues in digital design research, providing theoretical, empirical, and methodological sources for understanding digital design research. The first half of the book Exploring Digital Design is authored as a multi-disciplinary approach to digital design research, and represents novel perspectives and analyses in this research. The contributors are Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison and Christina Mörtberg in addition to the editors. Although primarily written for researchers and graduate students, digital design practioners will also find the book useful. Overall, Exploring Digital Design provides an excellent introduction to, and resource for, research into digital design.
Public and situated display technologies can have an important impact on individual and social behaviour and present us with particular interesting new design considerations and challenges. While there is a growing body of research exploring these design considerations and social impact this work remains somewhat disparate, making it difficult to assimilate in a coherent manner. This book brings together the perspectives of key researchers in the area of public and situated display technology. The chapters detail research representing the social, technical and interactional aspects of public and situated display technologies. The underlying concern common to these chapters is how these displays can be best designed for collaboration, coordination, community building and mobility. Presenting them together allows the reader to examine everyday display activities within the context of emerging technological possibilities.
