Doing Design Ethnography

by Andrew Crabtree, Mark Rouncefield, Peter Tolmie

Ethnography is now a fundamental feature of design practice, taught in universities worldwide and practiced widely in commerce. Despite its rise to prominence a great many competing perspectives exist and there are few practical texts to support the development of competence. Doing Design Ethnography elaborates the ethnomethodological perspective on ethnography, a distinctive approach that provides canonical 'studies of work' in and for design. It provides an extensive treatment of the approach, with a particular slant on providing a pedagogical text that will support the development of competence for students, career researchers and design practitioners. It is organised around a complementary series of self-contained chapters, each of which address key features of doing the job of ethnography for purposes of system design. The book will be of broad appeal to students and practitioners in HCI, CSCW and software engineering, providing valuable insights as to how to conduct ethnography and relate it to design.

Genres: Design, Research, Nonfiction

216 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2012

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

A generally very valuable, but slightly odd, guide to, well, doing design ethnography. It's an excellent introductory text for students: it's written in down-to-earth language (albeit haphazardly edited), and designed to address the inevitable concerns of students reading ethnographic literature and coming away with no sense of what to actually *do.* I wish I'd read it my first year of grad school.

The authors constantly reiterate that their task is teaching ethnography for information-technology design, not for high-theory sociology or for critical studies. And that point's fairly made and well-defended. Generally, though, the book reads like it's written by high-functioning GamerGaters: one can here the high-pitched whine against social justice warriors behind the reasonable drone of explaining how to use a tool to aid in commercial design processes. However, the distinction between "theory" and "method" on the one hand - both bad, because scholastic and compromised by advocacy agendas - and "epistemological discipline" on the other - good because "rigor" - seems like a political agenda more than a sustainable distinction.

Still, I'd happily use this book in the classroom, while working to situate it in an ideology of anti-ideology, and of the politics of defining a task to exclude what one finds distasteful.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently writing a review to appear in peer-reviewed journal, however, I would recommend this book to computer scientists, designers and anyone interested in doing technology research.