Resources > Ethnography for Design

Introductory material on ethnography in industry

Light reading on ethnography in organisations.

Bill's Excellent Adventure
Press coverage of Microsoft's hiring of some more anthropologist-ethnographers.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20040601/microsoft.html

The Consumer Anthropologist
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=2514&sid=0&pid=0&t=customer

Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village
"Get me Margaret Mead! The biggest names in business - GM, Intel, Nynex - enlist anthropologists to decode the rituals of corporate life."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/05/anthro.html

Off with the pith helmets (The Economist)
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2476910

Why having access to a usability lab can be a hindrance
http://www.othermedia.com/Articles/Articles0000000031.asp

Ethnography in NPD Research How "applied ethnography" can improve your NPD research process
http://www.pdma.org/visions/apr02/applied.html

The Poor But Happy Guide to Ethnography
http://poorbuthappy.com/ethnography/

Ethnography for user research and technology design

More heavyweight material looking at theoretical and practical aspects of conducting ethnography.

Amit, V. (2000) Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, Routledge

Anderson, B. (1996) Work, Ethnography and System Design, Rank Xerox Research Centre Tehcnical Report EPC-1996-103
www.ics.uci.edu/~ses/teaching/ics280/readings/ Anderson-WorkEthnoSystemDesign.pdf (pdf, 153KB)

Baba, M. L. (1998) History of Workplace Anthropology - The Anthropology of Work in the Fortune 1000: A Critical Retrospective
http://www.practicalgatherings.com/workplace_anthro/history.html

Crabtree, A. (2003) Designing Collaborative Systems, Springer

Forsythe, D. (1999) "It's Just a Matter of Common Sense": Ethnography as Invisible Work, CSCW 8: 127-145

Forsythe, D. (1992) Blaming the User in Medical Informatics, Knowledge and Society: The Anthropology of Science and Technology 9: 95-111
Many of Forsythe's papers - including the above two - are now gathered in Forsythe, Diana (2001) Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University Press

Gellner, D. and Hirsch, E. (2001) Inside Organizations: Anthropologists at Work, Berg

Grounded Theory: A Thumbnail Sketch
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/grounded.html

Harper, R. The Organisation in Ethnography: A Discussion of Ethnographic Fieldwork Programs in CSCW
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/papers.html

Harper, R. Information that Counts: A Sociological View of Information Navigation and Some Remarks about the World Wide Web
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/papers.html
A look at the work of country 'desk officers' at the IMF, in particular how they interact with different types of information.

Harper, R. and Hughes, J.A. (1993) "What a f-ing system! Send 'em all to the same place and then expect us to stop 'em hitting": Making Technology Work in Air Traffic Control, in Graham Button (ed.) Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction and Technology, Routledge
Available online:
http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Publications/Search-Publications.php

Hutchins, E. and Klausen, T. (2000) "Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit", in Stephanie Taylor (Ed.) Ethnographic Research: A Reader, Sage
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2003/cs6795_spring/cockpit-cog.pdf (pdf, 114KB)

Jordan, Brigitte (1997) Transforming Ethnography - Reinventing Research, Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal 9:3, 12-17
http://www.lifescapes.org/Writeups.htm

Jordan, Brigitte (2000) Notes on Methods for the Study of Work Practices (unpublished manuscript)
http://www.lifescapes.org/Writeups.htm

Jordan, Brigitte (2003) Persuasive Encounters: The Arguments for Ethnographic Workpractice Analysis (unpublished draft)
http://www.lifescapes.org/Writeups.htm

Lambert and McKevitt (2002) Anthropology in health research: from qualitative methods to multidisciplinarity, BMJ 325:210-213
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/325/7357/210

Luff, P., Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C. (eds.) (2000) Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Information System Design, Cambridge University Press

Nardi, B. and O'Day, V. (1999) Information Ecologies, MIT Press

Orlikowski, W. (1992) Learning from Notes: Organizational Issues in Groupware Implementation, MIT Sloan School Working Paper #3428-92
http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP134.html

Orlikowski, W. and Iacono, C. S. (2000) The Trush is Not Out There: An Enacted View of the "Digital Economy", in B. Kahin and E. Brynjolfsson (eds.) Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools and Research, MIT Press

Orlikowski, W., Walsham, G., DeGross, J. and Jones, M.R. (eds.) (1996) Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work, Chapman & Hall

Orr, Julian (1996) Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, Cornell University Press.
A study of field service technicians at Xerox.

Plowman, L. (ed.) (1996) The 'Professional Stranger', University of Sussex Cognitive Science Research Papers CSRP 428

Plowman, L., Rogers, Y. and Ramage, M. (1995) What Are Workplace Studies For?, Proceedings ECSCW 1995

Randall, D., Rouncefield, M. and Hughes, J. (1995) Chalk and Cheese: BPR and ethnomethodologically informed ethnography in CSCW
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/staff/rouncefield/Fieldwork/BPR.html

Rosenberg, Duska (1999) 3 Steps to Ethnography: A discussion of inter-disciplinary contributions, in AI & Society, Special Issue Journal, Pemberton L (Ed.)"Communications in Design", Vol.15, No.1, 2000
http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/~uhtm059/

Savage, J. (2002) Ethnography and health care (pdf, 162KB)
Provides coverage of the Hawthorne Studies, as well as subsequent research.

Schwartzman, Helen B. (1993) Ethnography in Organizations, Sage

Sharrock, W. and Hughes, J. A. (2000) Ethnography in the Workplace: Remarks on its theoretical bases
http://www.teamethno-online.org/Issue1/Wes.html

Squires, Susan and Byrne, Bryan (eds.) (2002) Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry, Bergin & Garvey

Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: the Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Cambridge University Press

Tyson, Philip J. (1992) The Desk as a Social Institution, Rank Xerox Research Centre (Cambridge) Technical Report EPC-1992-130, online at
http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Publications/Search-Publications.php
An observational study of a research lab reception desk, looking at both ideas from various disciplines about desks and the way people actually relate to their desks.

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