The Theory and Practice of Fieldwork for Systems Development
This page contains an outline of a tutorial originally developed byDave Randall (Manchester
Metropolitan University) and links to a number of online resources on
ethnographic methods.
Its further development is part of the DIRC TA 'Making Ethnography Accessible'.
Versions of this tutorial have been presented at CSCW, ECSCW and OzCHI
conferences.
'The Theory and Practice of Fieldwork for Systems Design' - a
summary of the tutorial's general aims and objectives.
'The Theory and Practice of Fieldwork for Systems Design' –
supplementary notes and slides.
Fieldwork & Interdisciplinary Design
In recent years there has been an
expansion of the notion of design to embrace a range of socio-technical
issues of varying kinds concerned with spatiality, temporality, sociality and
aesthetics. The domains and settings to which ‘design’ and technology is
relevant has also expanded to embrace domestic settings, public spaces of
various kinds, healthcare etc. The tutorial will address a range of
methodological and technical knowledge, skills, understandings and related
issues in fieldwork studies as used in the Social Sciences. In particular it considers a number
of advances in sophistication and rigour for conducting fieldwork research,
especially in inter-disciplinary projects; developments arising from the
incorporation of new or newly relevant disciplines, perspectives and
techniques – such as art and aesthetics, ethics and design; advances brought
about by the need to adopt and adapt existing methodological approaches to
new situations, such as public spaces, healthcare and domestic environments’
and by developing notions of what constitutes ‘best’ practice in fieldwork
studies for interdisciplinary research projects.
This is a rough outline of the areas
we hope to cover – what we actually cover will depend on participants
interests, boredom threshold etc etc..
1. Ethnographic perspectives and analytic procedures
2. Practical problems and support: Video, Audio, and Computer
Support.
3. Discussion and analysis based on case studies and
scenarios
4. Developing Ethnographic Methodologies – ‘probes’ - you
might like to look at this OzCHI
position paper on probes
5. Working through some examples of ‘probe’ material – you
might like to look at the CASIDE
project
6. Fieldwork in ‘Sensitive’ Settings: Examples, Problems
and Ethics.
7. Closing discussion
… and if we get through all that in 3 hours we’ll be
lucky.. and I’ll be surprised..
The
Tutorial Slides –
these are liable to change without warning…
Here are the slides and notes for the
CSCW 2006 Tutorial. The slides are far less concerned with some of the
theoretical auspices of fieldwork – but – for those interested – and for some
strange reason there appears to be a lot of you - these are covered in the
tutorial notes.
CSCW
2006 Fieldwork and Design Tutorial notes
CSCW 2006 Fieldwork and Design Tutorial slides
If you want to review some of the available resources on
ethnographic/fieldwork methods.
Click to browse the relevant section.
This section contains some references to online resources
that deal with the various theoretical approaches that employ ethnographic
methods of data collection.
This section contains a number of brief guides to ethnographic methods. There is also a number of slide presentations (and that number is 4).
Online Papers
This section is divided into papers by institution, papers by topic papers by project (Equator, the DIRC project etc) and papers by individuals.
Online
papers on the use of ethnography1 - institutions
Online
papers on the use of ethnography2 - topics
Online
papers on the use of ethnography3 – projects.
Online papers on the use of ethnography4 – individuals
This section is interested in some of the more practical aspects of fieldwork – how we go about ‘doing it’ - including discussions on the use of video and tool support.
This section contains links to papers that consider the use of various kinds of ethnography as a means of informing different phases of the design process; requirements elicitation, development and that attempt to address the problems of using ethnographic data in systems design.
As ethnography has effectively become mainstream new challenges have arisen. This section considers some recent(ish) developments in the deployment of ethnographic techniques (‘cultural probes’ and ‘technology probes’) and the analysis of ethnographic data (patterns).
Always a tricky problem for ethnographers, ethical issues of consent, privacy etc have become increasingly prominent in recent years.