Ethnography in Design Forum

Simon Rubens and Paula Neal organised a stonking launch event for the Ethnography in Design Forum last night. Held at PDD's offices (formerly the premises of Vivienne Westwood, apparently), the event brought together people from a range of organisations - both public and private - as well as a number of micro-business practitioners working in product design, service design and ethnography applied to new technologies.

Paula Neal briefly introduced the event, Lee Crossley described the kinds of ways that ethnographically informed research is used within PDD to inform product design, Joe Langford discussed his work with Deana McDonagh on the various ways that focus group-type setups can be used to feed into the design process, and Simon Rubens described the history of the E-lab/Sapient experience modelling approach and how this addresses the issue of reporting ethnographic findings, with simple visual structures that connect components and findings while also driving analysis and rigour.

There was then a lively debate about whether 'ethnography' in the commercial context was anything other than qualitative research by another name; whether all we were describing was just a set of tools (note: human-computer interaction is another 'tool-gathering' discipline) or a philosophy, and the problems of 'what you call it' and 'how to sell it' (I think I've seen this last debate in other disciplines recently: plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose).

Lots of people seemed keen on further events, so I'm sure this will take off. It would certainly fill a gap in the current London events scene: while designers, information architects, usability people and taxonomisers have become quite organised, the ethnography-qualitative research end hasn't been catered for in a while.