Implications for design | Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Abstract
Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the criteria by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.
References
[1]
Ackerman, M. 2000. The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 179--203.
[2]
Anderson, R. 1994. Representation and Requirements: The Value of Ethnography in System Design. Human-Computer Interaction, 9(2), 151--182.
[3]
Bazerman, C. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
[4]
Becker, H. 1993. Theory: The Necessary Evil. In Flinders and Mills (eds), Theory and Concepts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives from the Field, 218--229. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
[5]
Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. 1997. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan Kaufman.
[6]
Button, G. 2000. The Ethnographic Tradition and Design. Design Studies, 21, 319--332.
[7]
Campbell, D. T. 1969. Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fishscale Model of Omniscience. In: Sherif and Sherif (eds), Interdisciplinary relationships in the social sciences, 328--348. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
[8]
Clifford, C. 1983. On Ethnographic Authority. Representations, 2, 118--146.
[9]
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
[10]
Cypher, A. 1993. Watch What I Do. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[11]
Dourish, P. and Button, G. 1998. On Technomethodology: Foundational Relationships between Ethnomethodology and Systems Design. Human-Computer Interaction, 13(4), 395--432.
[12]
Forsythe, D. 1989. It's Just a Matter of Common Sense: Ethnography as Invisible Work. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 8(1--2), 127--145.
[13]
Frost, P. and Stablien, R. (eds). 1992. Doing Exemplary Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
[14]
Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity.
[15]
Gaver, W., Dunne, T., and Pacenti, E. 1999. Cultural Probes. interactions, 6(1), 21--29.
[16]
Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press.
[17]
Geertz, C. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton University Press.
[18]
Geiryn, T. 1983. Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review, 48(4), 781--795.
[19]
Grudin, J. 1990. The Computer Reaches Out: The Historical Continuity of Interface Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI'90 (Seattle, WA), 261--268. New York: ACM.
[20]
Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California.
[21]
Hill, R. 1995. Blackfellas and Whitefellas: Aboriginal Land Rights, The Mabo Decision, and the Meaning of Land. Human Rights Quarterly, 17(2), 303--322.
[22]
Hughes, J., Randall, D., and Shapiro, D. 1993. From Ethnographic Record to System Design: Some Experiences from the Field. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 1, 123--141.
[23]
Hutchinson, H., Hansen, H., Roussel, N., Eiderbäck, B., Mackay, W., Westerlund, B., Bederson, B., Druin, A., Plaisant, C., Beaudouin-Lafon, M., Conversy, S., and Evans, H. 2003. Technology Probes: Inspiring Design For and With Families. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2003 (Ft Lauderdale, FL), 17--24. New York: ACM.
[24]
Kling, R., McKim, G., Fortuna, J. and King, A. 2000. Scientific Collaboratories as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks: A Theoretical Approach. American Conference on Information Systems.
[25]
Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
[26]
Mackay, W. 1990. Patterns of Sharing Customizable Software. Proc. ACM Conf. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW'90 (Los Angeles, CA), 209-221. New York: ACM.
[27]
MacLean, A., Carter, K., Lövstrand, L., and Moran, T. 1990. User-Tailorable Systems: Pressing the Issues with Buttons. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI'90 (Seattle, WA). New York: ACM.
[28]
Malinowski, B. 1967. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.
[29]
Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95--117.
[30]
Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[31]
Miller, D. and Slater, D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.
[32]
Nardi, B. 1993. A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End-User Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[33]
Plowman, L., Rogers, Y., and Ramage, M. 1995. What are Workplace Studies For? Proc. European Conf. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW'95 (Stockholm, Sweden). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
[34]
Povinelli, E. 1995. Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending Aboriginal Labor. American Anthropologist, 97(3), 505--518.
[35]
Rogers, Y. 1997. Reconfiguring the Social Scientist: Shifting from Telling Designers What to Do to Getting More Involved. In Bowker et al., Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide. London: Erlbaum.
[36]
Schmidt, K. 2000. The Critical Role of Workplace Studies in CSCW. In Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff (eds), Workplace Studies: Rediscovering Work Practice and Informing Design. Cambridge University Press.
[37]
Suchman, L. 2002. Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World. The Information Society, 18, 139--144.
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2006
1353 pages
Copyright © 2006 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 22 April 2006
Permissions
Request permissions for this article.
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Article
Conference
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- Downloads (Last 12 months)863
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)81
Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
- Kaltenhauser ASavino Gvon Felten NSchöning J(2025)CHI's Greatest Hits: Analyzing the 100 Most-Cited Papers in 43 Years of Research at ACM CHIInteractions10.1145/370480432:1(28-33)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2025
- Berkholz JRahman AStevens G(2025)Playing with Privacy: Exploring the Social Construction of Privacy Norms Through a Card GameProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37012029:1(1-23)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
- Putro BRosmansyah YSuhardi Hadi SPutra RRachman E(2025)A learning service computing model in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)Interactive Learning Environments10.1080/10494820.2024.2443777(1-26)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
- Duc Son N(2024)Exploring User Cultural Identity in Shaping Reflective Design Style on Interactive User InterfacesUser Experience - A Multidimensional Analysis of Human-Artefact Interactions [Working Title]10.5772/intechopen.1007184Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
- Díaz MSmith ADas SGreen BVarshney KGanapini MRenda A(2024)What Makes an Expert? Reviewing How ML Researchers Define "Expert"Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society10.5555/3716662.3716693(358-370)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
- Wang SCooper NEby M(2024)From human-centered to social-centered artificial intelligence: Assessing ChatGPT's impact through disruptive eventsBig Data & Society10.1177/2053951724129022011:4Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
- Wu YMiller AChung CKaziunas E(2024)"The struggle is a part of the experience": Engaging Discontents in the Design of Family Meal TechnologiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870168:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
- Goree SAppleby GCrandall DSu N(2024)Attention is All They Need: Exploring the Media Archaeology of the Computer Vision Research PaperProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869558:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
- Resor E(2024)Simple Scores are Messy Signals: How Users Interpret Scores on Real Estate PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869358:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
- Das DGandhi DSemaan B(2024)Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869008:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
- Show More Cited By
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.