participatory design and ethnographic studies May 23, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , trackbacktwo days ago I attended a talk of Prof. Ina Wagner from the Institute of Design & Assessment of Technology of the Technical University Vienna. The Working Life Research Centre FORBA had invited her to talk about her ethnographic studies that she and her team are undertaking in the context of technology development.
The talk gave some insights into the complexity of such ethnographic studies and especially in the efforts that it takes to feed the results into design requirements.
Apart from the interesting talk that included a lot of references for further reading as well as some examples from practices there were 2 aspects that I found very interesting and also very relevant for the work that we are doing in our European R&D projects.
First of all, Ina Wagner presented one case in which they observed the working practices in 3 different hospitals with the final goal of implementing a common patient information management system for all three hospitals. At the end of the ethnographic studies it was decided that the system was not going to be built. The work practices were just too different.
Now if I think in the context of an R&D project, e.g. in the ICT programme of FP7, I have never come across a project so far that would have said after the first phase of requirements analysis that the project as such does not make sense. I have, however, not even seen any project that does some real intensive ethnographic studies before starting the implementation phase. Rather on the contrary, just too many times I have come across projects/proposals with only some “pro forma” user requirements elicitation that do not really include a in depth analysis of the actual context, neither during the design phase nor during the assessment.
The second interesting aspect that was addressed by someone from the audience is related to the current practices of ethnography and how this is already applied by technology providers, e.g. ICT industry. With the exception of very few big players, it seems that similar to many R&D projects driven by academia, industrial development is not yet applying these participatory practices.
In our latest proposal for an ICT project (that deals with the facilitation of work practices in the Creative Industries via ICT) we included ethnographic studies at the very beginning of the project, combined with some other methods of participatory design. Would be great if we could work on this project in the future. We will see if we make it to the list of funded projects….
Tags: ethnography, R&D
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mga wala muy klaro!