Tell Me Why You Did That: Learning “Ethnography” from the Design Studio

Design Practice and the Practice of Ethnography

An examination of ways in which designers interpret, practice and negotiate the use of ethnographic methods in the studio setting is reliant on a wide literature of work – most notably contributions from the field of design studies which establish the role of observational and ethnographic field work within innovation focused design processes. The role of observational and ethnographic work in developing innovation (Hawkins & Davis, 2012; Utterback, 2006), in examining “use before use” (Redström, 2008, p. 241), and as an instigator of design thinking (Brown, 2009; Cross, 2011; Rowe, 1987) is foundational both to the integration of ethnographic methods in design practice, and to the analysis of design practice as a research method unto itself (Dorst, 2011). The use of ethnography in design practice has been identified as a key function of service, experience and future oriented design work (Lindley, Sharma and Potts, 2014; Kjærsgaard, Gislev & Charlotte Smith, 2014) and is defined by its adaptation to collaborative research, limited time frames, and iterative applications (Crabtree, Andrew, Rouncefield, Mark, et al. 2012).

Many have challenged, as I do here, the notion of a purely ethnographic practice within the design studio: we have long known as ethnographers that the ways in which designers create a rich and detailed account of a culture through observation and interpretation differ markedly from traditional or academic methods (Fulton-Suri, 2011; Plowman, 2003). As Tunstall has noted, ethnography can be understood as a “transdisciplinary boundary object”, occupying different roles in the worlds of business, service, design and marketing (2008). The differentiating factor between ethnographic practice more broadly, and design-ethnography is, as Lindley, Sharma and Potts have suggested, one of observation versus intervention: the ethnographer seeks to explain and understand, whereas the design ethnographer seeks to intervene (2014). However, the goal of design-ethnography is recognizable to researchers in other disciplines as well: to experience and explore firsthand a social or cultural setting with the intent “to decode, translate, and interpret the behaviours and attached meaning systems of those occupying and creating the social system being studied” (Rosen, 1991, p.12).

The role, potential and function of ethnographic methods in the design studio have been well established by both anthropologists and design theorists (Anderson, 2009; Anderson, Salvador and Barnett, 2013). In fact, it has been a full decade since Blauvelt formally suggested the existence of a formal ethnographic turn in design research (2007) bringing about, as Bremner and Roxburg suggest, both the creative in the anthropologist and the anthropologist hidden inside the creative (2015). Currently, the use of ethnography and ethnographic method in the design studio serves as a market differentiator for the industry (Gunn, Otto, & Charlotte Smith, 2013). The integration of design-ethnography practices into the work of the designer serves to expand and make visible the porous boundaries of creative work, integrating a new set of capacities into the description of the designer, and expanding the definition of design itself to include practices of research through design processes (Wasson, 2000; Rogers and Yee, 2015; Salvador, Bell and Anderson, 1999).

Within the larger context of ethnography’s acknowledged role in the growth of innovation, the role of the designer as ethnographer is much celebrated, but remains relatively unexamined (Banks, Caldwell and Mayer, 2009). This lack of attention to the working practices of designers extends beyond their role in the shifting definition of ethnography: as Kimbell notes,

“detailed studies of professional designers such as…graphic designers – from whom we might learn something about design – have been relatively rare” (2011).

In contrast to this lack of attention to their daily work practice, examinations of cultural industries in which designers engage as intermediaries concerned with the implementation of strategies of differentiation (Bourdieu, 1984) position the designers as cultural producers, a framework which allows scholars such as Maguire and Matthews (2012) and Banks, Gill and Taylor (2014) to investigate the social and political forces that shape the working practices involved in the production of culture, and the cultures of production. As Weisner has noted, because all research activity conducted by designers is situated within a specific cultural context, it could all be understood to be ethnographic by default (1996) – the key differentiator between the “natural” ethnographic praxis of designers and the “deliberate” praxis of the ethnographer being a matter of, as Wollcott suggests, intent (1999). In this way, the process of filtering personal experience over time in order to devise innovative solutions to research problems becomes a form of ethnography in action, or design-informed ethnography (Sharma, 2016). This corresponds to Wolcott’s notion of ethnography as the analysis of the component parts of a culture, rather than the larger culture itself – a perspective which privileges the study of the practices that form a key differentiator between traditional and design ethnography methods (1999). However, most design education at the post secondary level does not offer research methodology training (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Squire and Newell, 2004), resulting in a nearly two-decade long call for increased pedagogical focus on design research methods at the post secondary level (Strickler, 1999) and a change in focus from design thinking to design learning in the educational studio space (Oxman, 1999).

Reconfiguring the User Within Ethnographic, Performance Oriented and Praxeographic Discourse

Of key importance in this issue is the conception of empathy – how it is developed differently within ethnographic practice and design-thinking, how it is accessed as a research tool, and how it is represented in ethnographic work. Empathy has been an established and qualified part of design work since the beginnings of human and user centered interaction design (Suchman, Blomberg, Orr and Trigg, 1999). As Brown has argued, the idea of empathy underpins the conception of designers as being “willing and able to interpret the perspectives of end users and the problems they face” (2009, p. 115). The implication is that the use of empathy within design is implicitly tied to the birth of the user – a movement that has been traced back to human computer interface (Norman and Draper, 1986), architectural (Alexander, 1975) and ergonomic design (Henry Dreyfuss Associates and Tilley, 2002) and which has, since the 1960s, positioned the image of the ‘user’ as the center of design practice. Movements such as human-centered design and user-centered design have created a user-centric model of design solutions focused on obscuring the system created by the designer themselves, rendering the labour and the practice of designers, as well as service providers, invisible and hidden from view. This has become increasingly problematic because of the use of stereotyped or market-data driven conceptions of the “user” of a product, service or communication – conceptions often unrelated to the needs and desires created by the practice (Warde, 2005) of which the designed product will soon become a part, and one which only hints at the realities of the user’s experience.

As Scott et al. outline, user-centric methods and movements such as universal, human-centered, participatory and interaction design often focus on “user needs to legitimize the conventional motive of design, which is of course to make and sell presumably better, but most definitely more stuff” (Shove et al., 2007, p. 137). However, as Anderson has noted, the scope and meaning of “human factors” has evolved as designers move from being concerned with physical and ergonomic factors (Dreyfuss, 2003) to concerns regarding psychological and emotional factors related to experience, service and interaction design (Crouch and Pearce, 2012). A desire for a collaborative and integrated relationship with the user has also expanded into the practices of participatory design and practice oriented design methods (Julier, 2007; Shove et al. 2007) – further complicating both the role of the user and the role of empathy in the development of design solutions.

Of particular interest in the reconfiguration of both the designer and ethnographic praxis in the studio setting are intertwined notions of practice and performance. Notions of performance, are, of course, not new to ethnographic praxis or the social sciences, with Goffman’s (1959) introduction of rhetorical performativity advanced and expanded in the wider methodological discourse by Conquergood (2002), Feldman (2011) and Hamera (2005). In addition, the performative aspects of observational field work, and of the reflexive position of “researcher” have been explored by Radway (1989), Gill (2011) and Rosen (1991). As Morisawa notes, the labour of the designer as researcher, and the labour of the designer as cultural producer can be understood as affective labour forms, a focus which in turn highlights the performative aspect of creative industry work (2015).

These performative aspects of cultural production have been a point of focus in the growing practice-oriented and situated approaches in design studies, a shift marked by a growing body of work by theorists such as Scott, Bakker and Quist (2012) and Simonsen et al. (2014). Situated and practice-oriented design methods propose an expanded definition of the integrative practice of design: abandoning the creator-centric professional model for one that involves “shaping and changing society” (Simonsen, Baerenholdt, Büscher, & Scheuer, 2010, p. 203) through collaborative and participatory acts that only hint at the desk-bound work of the designer of the past. Situated and practice-oriented design methods propose a redefinition of design practice to include the situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) of a cast of participants including designers and users, making use of and generating new situated knowledge to, as Bjogvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren suggest, “move from designing things (objects) to designing Things (socio-material assemblies)” (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012, p. 102).

This practice-oriented perspective is informed by the broader application of practice-oriented analysis methods (Nicolini, 2012; Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011) – a field defined more specifically as practice theory by Schatzki (2012) and Shove (2012). Practice theory allows for an examination of the interconnected and entangled assemblages of, as Shove explains, images, skills and stuff that make up social life, and the deconstruction and examination of the component parts which form the performative acts of everyday life (2007). A practice-oriented perspective within qualitative research, or a praxiographic study, assumes that the researcher examines the practice itself, and the practitioner and their praxis as separate though collaborative entities (Warde, 2005). A practice oriented perspective on design has been resoundingly taken up in work on the application of praxiographic research within the design studio (Scott, Bakker and Quist 2012) or what Simonsen, Svabo, Strandvad, Samson, Hertzum and Hansen (2014) have called “situated design”.. A practice oriented analysis allows the designer to engage with not only the social or material design problem at hand, but the social values (images) and user needs (skills) that come together to form the desired practice (Shove, 2012). Buegar (2014) and Mol (2002) each go so far as to suggest a praxiographic approach to the study of culture as a substitution for ethnographic methods, noting the importance of multiple understandings of the career of a practice as a changing entity within a larger system.

“Our work is built on our research”: Content Analysis of the Online Promotional Rhetoric of Design Studios

Four key themes emerged quickly from the online promotional studio rhetoric data set: the promotion of ethnographic methods as a market differentiator, as a method of targeting a specific audience, as an insight development tool, or as a method of testing for fit or optimization.

Table 1. Thematic Content Analysis of the Online Promotional Rhetoric of Design Studios

Analysis of 15 Canadian-based design studio websites with data collected between January and March 2015.

“We Just Look Around a Bit”: Critical Reflections on the Implications of ‘Designer Driven’ Ethnography.

The visible gap between the epistemological positions of ethnography, and those of design ethnography, or designer-led research forms is made evident in these interviews with designers. In the interview responses, we see marked differences in how designers select whom and what is studied, their methodological approach, and the goals of their inquiry. Though traditional ethnographic study would position knowledge as something that has to be personally experienced, designers appear to interpret their practice as the collection or acquisition of knowledge, and its internalization. In addition, designers report the objectification of their research subjects – suggesting that their ontological reality differs slightly, if at all, from that of the designer-researcher. Though designers appear to adopt the holistic, iterative, constructivist and socio-culturally focused epistemological imperatives of the ethnographic approach, they appear to reject the use of thick description, or the requirement of etic validity in coming to understand their object of study. One could argue for the value of the emic approach enacted by designers: by assuming the perspective of their community of study to the extent that they are able to embody it through empathic approaches, designers take on an extreme form of what Whitehead calls “emic validity” (2004). But the lack of investigations into behavioral context, and the privileging of behavioral acts over their linkages presents a stark contrast to epistemological assumptions that Boyle (1994) suggests are often shared in larger ethnographic communities.

This begs the question: if designers engage observational research methods not founded on theoretical frameworks but on the satisfaction of the creative brief, are they doing ethnography at all? What aspects of their methodological assemblage move their ‘design ethnography’ investigations beyond qualitative data collection, and into ethnographic territory?

Bringing The Field Into The Studio: The Adapted And Hybrid Research Methods Of Designers

This comparative analysis suggests that the lacunae formed by these contrasting but co-existing forces in design practice hides a new form of observational and interactive design thinking. Designer respondents demonstrated the ways in which they mobilized ethnographic methods to justify or generate abductive thinking practices, retaining the interpretive phase of ethnographic work and reconfiguring methods of observation and documentation beyond the suggested alterations to intent essential to the difference between design ethnography and its more traditional method forms. Analysis of these interviews and the overarching promotional audit structure of the studio suggests that as a result of the tension between the rhetoric of studios and the practice forms of designers, a new hybrid methodology is developed – one in which designers do not engage in ethnographic methods in order to achieve empathy, but rather substitute empathy for ethnography and formulate an adapted hybrid approach to ‘design ethnography’ through a three-part model of praxiography, performance and proxy audience membership. This three part model bridges the understanding of the user as presented in human centered design and user centered design models with one presented in ethnographic methods, repositioning the user not as a model or template to be fitted to with a specific market offering, but rather as a participant in the creative process made real either by collaborative involvement, or through their designer in the role of proxy.

Though designers may be untrained and uninformed about traditional conventions and values of ethnographic practice, it appears that a hybrid form of embodied research is emerging as a result of necessity: the review of the studio rhetoric provides ample context for the ways in which designers are required to engage in observational and participatory research methods in order to satisfy the customer promise, and these requirements have thus shaped the way that designers negotiate and engage ethnographic methods in their work. In this way, what designers are doing could be further understood as a form of applied observational design thinking, or empathy centered design, rather than traditional market-factor and innovation driven creative process.

Kimbell suggests a critique of empathy focused aspects of “design thinking”, suggesting that though designers are positioned as interpreters of what end users need, and though they are tasked with the use of ethnographic methods to help them develop empathy with situated actions and perspectives of users, designers themselves are not trained to examine issues of reflexivity, their own theoretical and political commitments, or the ways in which these commitments and perspectives shape their research findings (2011). As she suggests, this complexity manifests itself in the ways in which design thinking fails to reference wider theories of the social, or to illuminate the context of the design intervention.

Though ethnographic methods have become reified as the “unseen key to user’s needs” (Tunstall, 2010) the comparative analysis of both the interview data from designers and the promotional materials of innovation focused studios suggests that designers achieve empathy with users, and develop innovative insight not through the “design ethnography” so celebrated in writings from the field (Dishman, 2003; Laurel, 2003) and in promotional materials generated by studios, but through a unique methodological combination of performance, praxiography, and proxy audience membership developed in reaction to the requirements of the studio structure. The findings from the comparative analysis of the designer interviews and the studio website content shine a new light on the way in which designers negotiate and challenge – in essence, make use of – ethnography in their work: answering the question of how embodied research forms reconfigure conceptions of who is licensed to act as a participant, how data is collected and used, and even the focus of observational field work itself. Analysis of these findings concentrates on these three hybrid practices introduced by designers that serve as altered or negotiated embodied research forms.

Shifting the Boundaries of Participants: The Designer as Proxy Audience Member

Analysis of the tensions between the studio rhetoric and the designer’s self described practice highlights the unique and creative ways in which designers engaged in documenting their observations for further interpretation. Contrary to traditionally understood ethnographic practice, designers were not using sketchbooks or other codified forms of field notes, but were instead treating their observations more akin to a form of method acting: immersion in a character that could then be summoned at a later date, with the designer standing in as proxy. In one interview, a designer shared that

“…you only have to talk to one grandma to know about how to think like a grandma. I mean, here, watch: I’m 88, I wish I was more socially engaged, I have limited mobility, I like tea. See? I can be the grandma now for everyone”.

When prompted to examine this move in more detail, specifically in reference to how designers record their observations for later use, the same designer shared that “You don’t record, you just learn to be them. Then you can use it”. By assuming the role of proxy audience member for future stages of design work, designers are able to limit the amount of time spent in the field while maximizing the value of their findings throughout the design project. This has clear implications for bias, assumptions, and value of the research itself. However, it emerges as a hybrid born of compromise in the daily practice of designers in the studio setting. The use of the proxy (or surrogate) audience member is a common trope in the development of conventional narratives – in fiction an audience proxy is permitted to advance a narrative both by asking the questions that the audience might have, and by serving as a mirror for the projections that the audience might feel. The development of the proxy user appears to serve the same dual role in both the generation and interpretation of findings for designers engaged in embodied research or empathy centered design, allowing the user or audience to project their needs onto the designer as blank slate, and for those needs and beliefs to be re-projected in the studio setting through the vehicle of the designer.

“She Did It Just Like This”: Replacing Data Analysis With Performance in the Studio

As Conquergood proposed, and as has been taken up by leading voices in the field of contemporary ethnography, the delivery of ethnography in the form of performance is not only radical, but it can be additionally transformative. The field of design may have skipped the initial step of the textual encoding of a culture, and moved immediately to the performance of their interpretive work: findings from this comparative analysis suggest that designers use acts of performance, or as Dishman has suggested, “informance” or informed practice (2002) to recreate their observations for the purposes of interpretation and analysis in the studio setting. In this way, the performance of observational data replaces the data itself, with the performance of the designer in the studio space made repeatable and replicable for further analysis. “We want to know how they do it” was a common response found in the interview data – in this hybrid model of design ethnography performance appears to play a key role in the extension of fieldwork into the studio space.

Observational Design Thinking: A Praxeographical Approach to Designer-Led Field Work

Findings from this study suggest one final bridge or shift from traditional ethnographic methods to a hybrid designer-led embodied research form. Instead of focusing on understanding a culture, designers instead reported following a practice – a method akin to praxiography rather than ethnography. In interview responses, designers indicated that though they knew that the expectations of the studio space was that they provide a “deep dive” into the culture of their audience, their actual research work focused more on the practice at hand, and the entanglements of what Shove describes as “images, skills and stuff” (2012). In examining how audience members interacted with material forms through embodied action, in reaction to social conditions, values and expectations, designers demonstrated reliance not on ethnographic methods, which were being sold by the studios, but on praxiographic ones (Mol, 2002). Though design studio websites used terms referencing the importance of the audience or user culture, and though promotional rhetoric positioned the designer as either the researcher, interpreter/translator, clairvoyant or evaluator of this culture, designers appear to satisfy the requirements of their creative brief by focusing on practices and material influences, following the practice form through its career and not the culture as expected in traditional ethnographic forms. This, though complicating the ethnographic approach, aligns closely with the practice-oriented and situated design methodological proposals issued by Scott et al., (2012) and Simonsen et al., (2014): hewing closely to more contemporary approaches encouraged not only in design studies, but also in social theories of practice (Shove et al., 2012).