culturalbytes - Tricia Wang

Ethnography of Robots: Stuart Geiger on culture, technology, and Latour

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:17:00 -0500

I love Heather Ford’s Interview with Stuart Geiger, The Ethnography of Robots. Stuart talks about an ethnography of robots in his thought provoking answers that cover a critical take on Actor Network Theory to why anthropologists and sociologists may freak out at looking at culture through the eyes of a robot. I highly suggest reading this interview in its entirety! He brings up so many ideas that I’ve read this several times and I’m still digesting it two months later.

“The argument is not so much that a robot society is very much ‘alive’ in the same way that human societies have, say, deviant individuals, fluid norms, fascinating rituals, internal contradictions, complicated power relations, and many more weirdly beautiful and complex aspects hidden just below the surface.

Rather, the point of anthropology is typically to locate a people who are typically strange and foreign to us, and then relate the way in which those people live, showing not only how they are different from us but also how they are the same. In doing so, we learn not only about others, but also ourselves. So in that framework, I tend to agree with the critics who say that only way to give a vitalistic account of a robot society is by projecting too many human qualities onto the non-human. What is then left is a non-vitalistic ethnography: an account of a culture devoid of life. Like with Latour and agency, once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this.”

Service Design Ethnographer, Panthea Lee

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:01:15 -0500

Service Design Ethnographer, Panthea Lee :

rebloggeed from Ethnography Matters:

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

Ethnography Matters hopes to interview Panthea Lee of reBoot with our own list of questions, but in the meantime, Dave Seliger of Core 77 tracked Panthea down A Better World By Design conference. For those of you who are not familiar with Panthea’s work, Tricia Wang about Panthea’s Design Research essay a few months ago on Ethnography Matters.

We liked Panthea’s explanation of NGO’s perception of their own value in a community:

With a lot of these NGO’s, people assume they’re doing a lot of good work and then they design a program poorly or design a bad service and they put it out there and beneficiaries have to use it because they don’t have any other options. There’s no accountability.

Panthea then cuts through the hype of designing for “social change”:

Design for social change is a very “sexy” topic and you see a lot of design firms now going to the public sector and to NGO’s saying, ‘We’re designers, we’re here to help you!’ And they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You don’t speak our language, you don’t know development theory, you don’t know our approach.’ It helps to know why things are the way they are today because so much of the time you see people jumping in and saying, ‘We’re going to design for change and things are going to be better.’

But what’s the context around why we have these problems to begin with? What has already been tried? I think design firms—well-intended, very talented—don’t always understand that and so I think governments look at them a little weirdly. With most of the people from Reboot, we come from those kinds of organizations and we know what we don’t know. I think that is an advantage for us.

Read the rest of the interview with Panthea on Core 77, A Better World By Design Spotlight on Panthea Lee of Reboot. And if you didn’t get to go the conference, Dave Seliver provides a roundup of each day of the conference a the end of the post!

"…he [she] is forced to represent the individual as a completely passive victim of the system… we are..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:49:17 -0500

““…he [she] is forced to represent the individual as a completely passive victim of the system… we are all aware of how consumers resist such a precise injunction, and of how they play with needs, on a keyboard of objects. We know that advertising is not omnipotent and at times produces opposite reactions; and we know that in relation to a single need, objects can be substituted for one another… if we acknowledge that a need is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a need for difference (the desire for social meanings), only them will we understand that satisfaction can never be fulfilled, and consequently that there can never be a definition of needs.“”

- Jean Baudrillard, Selected writings (1988)

reflagged from Nicolas Nova at Pasta & Vinegar: Baudrillard on the difficulty to grasp people’s needs

The Future of Computing in China: Stories that Bind or Fragment Tech Communities

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:25:00 -0500

This was originally published on Bytes of China. In this post, my discussion on trust, creativity, and stories in the Chinese computing industry is relevant to how culture binds or fragments tech communities.

______

The future of computing in China is a frequent topic in the tech community.

Most recently, NY Times published an article by John Markoff and David Barboza that discusses a near future where China’s computing industry could close in on the US. The authors provided many examples, such as China’s successful super computing industry and the number of programmers coming out of universities and being sent abroad.

James Landay wrote a response that countered Markoff’s and Barboza’s optimism. Landay explained that while China has made great strides reforming its academic system to produce top programmers, there are systematic issues (such as power structure within universities, the education system, and patent incentives) that prevent creativity among programmers from being rewarded.

I’d like to extend upon Landay’s comment on the cultural barriers to China’s computing industry and offer my ideas of the primary challenges for the future of computing in China.

The three things holding China’s computing industry from creating disruptive innovation is the 1.) lack of trust between individuals, groups, and institutions, 2.) lack of organizations that foster creativity and community, and 3.) lack of common myth among technologists, engineers, and programmers.

1. Trust matters

China’s computing industry lacks trust between individuals and institutions. Both articles from Landay and Markoff and Barboza touch upon trust issues around patent protection. But when I talk about trust, I am referring to two types of trust, 1.) trust between individuals that leads (or doesn’t) to collaborations, and 2.) social trust between individuals and institutions.

Markoff’s and Barboza’s article pointed to collaborations between universities as indicators of China’s growing computer industry. But these collaborations are still far and few between and more importantly, they operate independently from each other. Industrial social structures matter in how industries form, as demonstrated by AnnaLee Saxenian’s research on the emergence of Silicon Valley in California. Her analysis revealed that tech companies in Boston, Massachusetts Route 128 operated in a decentralized and independent fashion, while companies in California’s Silicon Valley adopted a more decentralized but cooperative system. She argued that Silicon Valley was able to generate more innovation because its unique industrial structure encouraged collaboration between companies.

Trust is an essential factor for collaboration. The missing ingredient in Route 128 wasn’t investment or human capital, it was trust. Without the underlying social bond of trust, companies were largely isolated from each other, which prevented collaboration. Lack of collaboration hindered healthy levels of sharing and competition.

The Chinese tech industry is set up more like Route 128 than Silicon Valley. There are pockets of innovation in China, but the innovators are not networked, nor are they collaborating. A common question that Chinese people ask is why China does not have a Steve Jobs. Whenever I hear this question, I ask myself, could Steve Jobs have created Apple in Route 128, instead of Silicon Valley? I’ll leave that question for the experts to ponder.

Another type of trust that is missing is social trust of institutions. Aside from the major educational barriers that Landay pointed out and the legal intellectual property barriers that Markoff and Barboza highlighted, the general distrust in bureaucratic institutions is holding back the Chinese computing industry. In a country were information is explicitly filtered and monitored, how can people develop trust in large-scale computing systems? Sure, China has gotten this far by creating the fastest super-computers (at one point). But super-computing does not require high levels of trust, whereas cloud-computing does.

Cloud-computing is user-centric. One of the most important points in Landay’s article is that cloud-computing is where innovations matter the most:

“people seem to see much more important innovation going on in the cloud computing clusters that literally combine thousands of commercial processors together in standard racks connected with traditional networks in huge data centers around the world. This is the technology that powers Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the many other web computing giants of the world and is then resold inexpensively to every little web site or mobile phone application that needs to do computing in the cloud. This type of architecture supports a far wider range of applications than supercomputing.”

If cloud-computing is a better indicator of where the Chinese computing industry is at, then it would appear from the recent burst of cloud-computing projects in China that its computing industry is doing quite well. Ge Jin reports on China Bubble Watch:

“In April 2011, the government of Chongqing became the first to announce its plan to invest 40 billion yuan on a cloud computing center that will be the largest in Asia. The plan is called “Yun Duan” (Top of Cloud). Then Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou all followed suit. Shanghai plans to build a “Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Center”, its plan is called “Yun Hai” (Ocean of Cloud), Beijing has a plan called “Xiang Yun” (Cloud of Blessing), Shenzhen has a plan called “Kun Yun” (Cloud of Flying Fish), Guangzhou has a plan called “Tian Yun” (Cloud of Sky), Ningbo has “Xing Yun” (Galaxy Cloud), Wuxi has “Yun Gu” (Cloud Valley), Hangzhou has “Yun Chao Shi” (Cloud Supermarket) ……

According to a report from China High Tech Herald, even poor cities like Lanzhou and Langfang joined the “cloud making carnival”. Langfang, a third tier city in Hebei province announced its plan for a cloud storage center that is at least two times the size of the largest existing cloud storage center in the world, which is in Chicago.”

But in China, anything that happens this quickly is suspect. Ge Jin reveals that cloud-computing is part of larger real-estate schemes.

“The first thing people should know about cloud computing in china is that it is again driven by state capitalism. Once the technocratic officials of China become aware of the concept of cloud computing, they immediately see the potential of applying their magic formula of “fixed asset investment+government subsidy+cheap loan” on it, because after all cloud computing does involve some large physical infrastructure.”

Chinese efforts at cloud-computing are largely government subsidized projects built on shady relationships where it is not clear where money is coming from and where it is going.

Ge Jin’s article reveals the fundamental problem with cloud-computing in China - there is little trust in it. A common response from Chinese internet users is that they trust foreign internet companies more than Chinese internet companies with their information. Most users tell me that they don’t trust putting their information up in the Chinese clouds because there is no guarantee that the company will be around next year. In addition, distrust of the government is also a common response. Having become accustomed to explicit information filtering from the largest cyber police force in the world, users have low trust in putting their information up in the clouds, thus another barrier to cloud-computing.

2. Organizational hubs of creativity matter.

China needs organizations that will foster creativity across software, hardware, and social boundaries.

Markoff and Barboza pointed to the rise of collaborations between institutions in China as indicators of China’s burgeoning computer industry. I would be cautious of interpreting these indicators as measures of creativity, which is a critical element of disruptive innovation.

In Michele Hoyman’s and Christopher Faricy’s research, “It Takes a Village: A Test of the Creative Class, Social Capital and Human Capital Theories,” they counter Richard Florida’s work by arguing that creativity and economic growth can be mutually exclusive. Their work tells us that China can continue to experience great economic growth and computing progress without becoming a hub of creativity. So contrary to what Florida argues, creativity and economic development are not always positively correlated.

This is not to say that I don’t see bubbles of amazing creativity in China. One only has to look to Silvia Lindtner’s research on co-working and collaborative spaces like Xindanwei and Xinchejian for proof that China is not lacking in creative minds. But will these communities of creativity reach the tech industry at large? Will Chinese companies lead in creating shared value (Kevin Lee has a great post about this topic)? My experience so far tells me that in the Chinese computing industry, the answer is no, at least for now.

In research that I conducted (with Jofish Kaye) on hacker spaces in the Bay Area, I witnessed great fluidity between various creative spaces. People who worked at facebook could be found hacking away at Hacker Dojo or people who worked at a start-up would teach a class at Noisebridge. So far, I don’t see any of that happening in China’s co-working spaces. Even those these spaces are quite new, it’s hard to imagine engineers at Tencent QQ taking time out of their grueling schedule to build an arduino board for fun. I see lots of Chinese artists and designers, and international techies at these new co-working spaces, but the missing group are the computer programmers from industry and academia.

I don’t want to underestimate the importance of these new co-working communities, but a few of these sites scattered throughout the country is not enough for massive cultural change. What China needs is an organization that will cut through horizontal and vertical layers of bureaucracy, regional differences, software and hardware industries, and institutions, to bring together people to share.

The US has organizations whose sole mission is to build up the community between techies (the social science kind and programming kind) across industry and academia. Conferences organized by O’Reilly from Web 2.0 to Foo Camp bring together thousands of people in the computer industry to network, share, and play. Existing organizations are hardware and service specific. For example, organizations such as China Great Wall Club plays an important role in bringing together mobile internet service providers, but their audience does not expand beyond mobile, at least for now. And there are a few others organizations here and there, but they don’t meet enough and often care more about membership fees than community development. China needs an organization, like O’Reilly, that will bring together academics, researchers, programmers, social scientists, hackers, artists, designers, and writers. Global research centers proposed by Landay would be a start.

3. Stories matter.

For China to become a disruptive innovator in computing, it needs a common myth to unify players from different social backgrounds. The lack of a common story prevents the emergence of a cohesive computing culture in China.

In Morgan Ames’s research on One Lap Per Child, she looks at the kind of stories that technologists and programmers tell about themselves and how these stories are designed into technologies. She argues that the largely male culture of computer programming draws upon a mythologized childhood of independence from adults and freedom to explore computers. In their stories, programmers tend to ignore all the social and demographic factors that makes their story possible, such as being Caucasian, male, middle- to upper class, and having parents who encouraged them to use the computers, and going to schools that had access to computers. Regardless of how accurate these “pull yourself up by your own bootstrap” narratives are, it is a common one that binds computer programmers together.[2] Narratives can be powerful because they allow people to establish trust across time, social distance, and space. So what kinds of stories are circulating among Chinese programmers? I have yet to be able to identity a strong one yet.

Though I would like to point out an interesting story that comes from the mobile industry, the story of shanzai. What started out as a response from a few rogue mobile hardware producers in Southern China who wanted to avoid paying the government taxes on handset producers, has now spawned a whole industry of shanzai products that goes beyond the original definition of being cheap copies of existing products. Shanzai mobile makers did what Nokia, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola could not do - they met the user needs of millions of new cell[phone users (more on this topic from me). By working outside of the dominant infrastructure of mobile producers, shanzai makers went wild with producing mobile phones with new features that were relevant for low-end users. Shanzai mobiles has give the low-end market, that was once dominated by Nokia, a greater number of choices in mobiles at a lower cost. Shanzai is still in the process of moving beyond the perception of being a copy culture to a bottom-up innovation culture, so it is not a story that is embraced by the programming community at large right now.

All stories need a good enemy. For shanzai makers in China, it was the government that levied oppressive taxes. For hackers in the West, is was the education system that tried to prevent them from exploring self-directed learning. So who are the bad guys in the eyes of Chinese programmers?

***

Although I have named several barriers to China’s computing industry, trust, creativity, and stories, I don’t think that the Chinese computing industry will not be successful if it doesn’t achieve all these factors, but whether it will be a Route 128 or Silicon Valley is still to be seen. Creativity and economic growth are not necessarily correlated.

Like Landay and many others, I’m not so optimistic about the actual system changing anytime soon. But here’s the thing, I don’t expect it to. Because systems take lots of time to change, and the bigger they are, the more change resistant they are. For example, compulsory public education in the US began in the early 1900s. In China, it only began in 1986. The US has had over 100 years to experiment with liberal education. China has only had a litte more than 20 years, and they have a lot more people.

My own research so far tells me that tech innovation in China will not model the West. For example, in the West, following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities and companies arrange mutually beneficial partnerships to facilitate the ease of IP transfer. This does not have to be a model elsewhere. Research from David Mowery and Bhaven Sampat (The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and University-Industry Technology Transfer: A Model for Other OECD Governments) cautions us from extending the US model of university-corporate partnerships globally because the success of the Bayh-Dole Act is heavily dependent on the history of education and tech industry in the US. And a recent paper from Paul M. Swamidass and Venubabu Vulasa, Why university inventions rarely produce income? Bottlenecks in university technology transfer, questions whether univeristy research is even producing marketable innovations. Both these studies bring up important points, innovation will look different in different contexts. [3]

The future of computing lies in individuals and groups who will collaborate across social and industry boundaries, and know how to handle the unique constraints of technology usage in China as welcomed challenges. And this is why Silvia Lindtner’s research is so fascinating, because her research suggests that innovation in China may not come from the computer industry as we know it, it may come from these loose forms of transnational Chinese who breathe design, art, and tech. And my research on non-elite users and shanzai culture suggests that disruptions from the bottom up can contribute to the innovations in the field at large. Both of our research point to different dynamics of innovation than seen in the West.

In the meantime, we need more coverage of the Chinese tech scene from writers like Markoff and Barboza who avoid Western-centrism and more writing from experts like James Landay who can provide a nuanced insiders perspective. It’s an exciting time to be a witness to how processes of trust building, creative development, and storytelling are being worked through in China as its economy is challenging the existing global order.

In Neil Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, he writes that in an era of American economic decline where inflation is high and inequality is great,

“There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery”

According to the prophet of the tech industry, despite economic decline in America, it will continue to provide good stories, software, and service.

———————————————————————

[1] This is not to say that users’ distrust will lead to more distrust in Chinese cloud-computing. Carol Heimer’s research shows that strategies of distrust are not iterative, rather they can lead to the necessary groundwork for establishing trust. For example, as suspect as US and Europeans are of companies’ handling of individual’s private data, it is this very suspicion that creates a healthy level of check and balances between companies and individuals.

[2] This mythologized childhood story of computer programming is shared by so many male techies that is often works in exclusionary ways, such as alienating females and minority programmers who do not share a similar childhood, as evidenced by research from Jane Margolis and Allen Fisher.

[3] Landay explained that the field of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) as lacking in Chinese scholars. But Ubicomp is not a field that the industry looks to for innovation. Students and researchers of Ubicomp and other similar fields are often times more concerned with producing papers than creating innovative contributions that will leave the lab.

"Theory is like underwear. It should be worn inside, not outside."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:16:38 -0500

“Theory is like underwear. It should be worn inside, not outside.”

- Richard Madsen (Background: Him and I were discussing where I put the theory section in my chapter outline.)

The Invisibility of Ethnography

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:33:15 -0500

The Invisibility of Ethnography:

(I published this on Ethnography Matters)

What are ethnography’s doings? I mean, really, how do you describe what exactly an ethnographer does? S/he watches people? Explains people’s feelings? Translates cultural ideas into concrete stuff? I’ve come up with some interesting ways that work for me to describe my work, but it still requires context and to a person who has never worked with an ethnographer before, it’s not always clear.

Heller Communication writes about the invisibility of socially innovative design.

Design for social innovation begins with the design of conversations themselves – it requires treating a conversation with the same care, and the same planning, that would be appropriate for the design of a product. Conversation starts everything – and yet we rarely think of them as an opportunity for design. This is not only the most important, upstream part of the systems that we need to change, it’s the fastest way for a designer to become a vital part of a strategic initiative. It’s where things begin, and where the most important things are decided.

On the hard side, it doesn’t provide much of a portfolio. Nothing to enter into design competitions, few samples to put on your website, harder to explain at a cocktail party just what it is that you do. In fact, most of the invisible things you’ll be designing are private and sensitive to CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations. You can’t even talk about them. This can be a tough shift for designers who are loathe to give up the artifacts of their work. Of course it doesn’t mean that you won’t design any artifacts, it only means that they will be the last thing you design, not the first.

The implication for Design for Social Innovation is that the most important design of all is invisible. It’s not the “stuff”, not the artifacts, not the technologies. It’s the beliefs, the ethos, the values, the systems behind the campaigns and products and events that form them. It’s designing events and products and behavior before they happen. And that is precisely where we need to be designing.

While they were talking about designers, I thought it was super relevant for ethnographers. The key point they emphasize is that great design starts with stories. I would add that for ethnographers, we don’t just listen to stories, we look at interactions and the field of ethnographic research has developed methods for the observation of human interactions.

There are two broad ways (though not limited these two) that ethnographers work inside a company. They either participate in the design process from the beginning or they come in after or in the middle of a product design. In both cases, ethnographic work can often be invisible, but I think it can be harder for ethnographers to come in after a product has been designed.

(I use the words products & services interchangeably).

Ethnography all the way – Ethnographers often work with teams whose sole focus is to bring something to the market whether it be a product or service. Engineers, programmers, and designers all want to figure out the next big hit for the company and the industry. In this kind of milieu, you need people who can give you insight into what users want and what new “stuff” users could incorporated into their everyday lives. Ideally, ethnographers need to be part of the design process from the very beginning and throughout the whole process as equals with other team members. So an ethnographer’s role in this case is to provide insights into features or assumptions that will not work for users. Depending on how much users are valued, this role can be seen as the voice of doom or the voice of wisdom. This strategy, often called user experience, has been cited as a core aspect of Apple’s success. Apple is great at minimizing a product’s complexity while delivering a fulfilling user experience. Steve Jobs has emphasized the importance of a social science & humanities perspective in designing products because it helps one understand the human experience. Why do we need to understand the human experience? Because technology is designed to fulfill social needs, not technological needs. Companies that connect with the users understand and practice this mantra to their core.

Ethnography mid-way – Ethnographers also work with teams who are trying to perfect or build on an existing product/service through user testing strategies. By this stage, assumptions about users have already been built into the product. So in a context where ethnographers are brought on after the product/service has been designed, they can guide the team through assumptions that have been made about user, how these assumptions affect users, and which assumptions are helping or getting in the way of the user experience. But this isn’t always the case.

In many cases, ethnographers are brought on with the sole expectations that they will give recommendations for how to create a better product. The issue here is that it’s hard to get to better without engaging in a conversation about what existing features don’t work; you can’t just keep adding without a reflection on minimizing. It’s often confusing for ethnographers who are in this position. It’s not that they don’t want to provide suggestions for how to improve the user experience, but programmers or designers often frame ethnographic critique as a case where the ethnographer does not appreciate or understand the full value of the technology.

***

Ethnography mid-way and ethnography all the way have their own set of constraints. But both processes have to grapple with the invisibility of their work. One way to overcome this is that ethnographers have to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value. This is one of the reasons I value and love learning from designers because they are experts at visualizing their process. Design used to be invisible or an after-thought. But with design companies like Frog and IDEO, the field of human computer interaction and design at large has really benefited from their process of formalizing design methodology.

I was at a conference and overheard a conversation about X company’s use of ethnography. Anika works at a well known tech company who has a whole team of ethnographers with multi-disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, design, sociology, ethnomethodology, and psychology. The company produces various digital products and services.

Lestor: How is ethnography useful to the products your company creates?
Anika: It’s been useful in what you don’t see, the products we haven’t brought to the market.

I thought this conversation was such a lovely illustration of a specific way to explain the practical and financial benefits for companies to hire ethnographers. It’s often hard to justify or show evidence of an ethnographer’s achievements because ethnographic work inside companies can often be invisible. Ethnographic insights can help a company figure out which products work for now, which products need to be shelved, or which products should be kept in R&D for well, more R&D.

As Jeff Yang reminds us in his tribute to Steve Jobs, great design is just as much about absence and elimination.

"yes, the most successful, innovative sites on the internet are mostly devoted to celebrity gossip,..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:23:06 -0500

“

yes, the most successful, innovative sites on the internet are mostly devoted to celebrity gossip, but that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be supplanted. The nobler goals of this revolution are to disseminate information to parts of the world that do not have it, to strengthen democracy, to give a voice to everybody, and to speak truth to power.

At the same time, if you believe that the internet is a revolution, then you must take seriously the consequences of that revolution as it is. The mistake that many supporters of the Bolsheviks made was to think that once the old order had been abolished the new order would be fashioned in the image of the best of them, rather than the worst. But the revolution is not just something you carry inside you; the web is not your dream of the web. It is a real thing, playing out its destiny in the world of flesh and steel—and pixels, and books.

At this point the best thing the web and the book could do for one another would be to admit their essential difference. This would allow the web to develop as it wishes, with a clear conscience, and for literature to do what it’s always done in periods of crisis: keep its eyes and ears open; take notes; and bide its time.

”

- More from the Internet as Social Movement (via modernandmaterialthings)

Ethnography Matters: A new blog about Ethnography!

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:25:00 -0500

There’s a new blog about ethnography! Ethnography Matters explores what is means to be an ethnographer today.

Of all the amazing blogs out there on anthropology and design, there wasn’t a place where ethnographers who focus on technology & media could discuss and share ideas, methods, and tips. So Heather Ford, Rachelle Annechino, Jenna Burrell, and I decided to make a place just for that!

Here’s an excerpt from our About Us page that explains why we started this blog:

We came together to start this blog because we believe that ethnographic research — with its focus on human experiences in context — is critical for countering the trend towards users as numbers, as digits, as data and as markets. In the push to scale technologies globally, technological talk often focuses on the production and consumption of technological goods — There are Users, Makers, and Artifacts — and very little in between.

We believe in the in between.

This blog will be a place for conversation between academic and applied ethnography, for listening to and thinking about people’s stories, and for analysis and theory focused on the social patterns and contexts of technological (re)use, rejection and (re)construction.
In the specific frame of technology research and design, ethnography matters because the practice of telling user stories, exposing how technology makes us and how we make technology, can help to direct information tools in the service of human values like empathy, global solidarity, surprise and joy. Ethnography matters because it provides a mechanism for evaluating theories of “revolutionary” technology as grounded in the lived experience of people and communities.

Ethnography matters because it helps to keep technology development real. Through ethnography we can delve into what we have in common and where we diverge to better envision human possibilities. When we understand this we can, in turn, get a better grasp on why technology matters.

Come check out our latest posts.

Jenna Burrell has written a great review of Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell.
Heather Ford has a reflective piece new geographies of social media.
I just wrote a piece about the invisibility of ethnography.
Rachelle wrote an insightful piece about drawings of places before and after big events, like the raids in Occupy Oakland.

Here are some different ways you can keep up with the convo:

add our RSS feed
follow the tweets for this blog @ethnomatters
sing up for the EthnoZine monthly newsletter for blog updates
join the Ethnography Matters Google Groups

We would love ideas and your participation! We would love guest bloggers! Here are some ways you can contribute:

QUOTES: Do you have a favorite quote about ethnography? Can you share it with us?
OBJECTS of the TRADE: What’s in your bag? Tell us what you bring with you to the field? Take a picture and send it over! Do you have suggestions for outfits to wear or things to bring?
QUESTIONS: What questions do you frequently get asked when you talk about ethnography? How do you answer them?
INTERVIEWS: Any suggestions for who you would like to see interviewed?
SYLLABUS AS ESSAY: Do you teach a class on ethnographic methods? Check out the Atlantic’s Syllabus as Essay series for an example and let us know if you have an essay to submit
TEACHING: What are some tips, videos, or readings that you find useful for teaching and talking about ethnography?
FAVORITE TEXTS: What are your favorite texts ranging from books, quotes, and journal articles? What are your go-to texts when you need inspiration for ethnography? And would you suggest are the must-read texts?
SUGGEST A BLOG: Do you have a blog about ethnography or do you know of a great blog about ethnography that we should add to your blogroll?
PROMOTE A PUBLICATION: Do you have a publication you would like to share? We would love to highlight useful books and articles.
EVENTS: Is there an upcoming conference that you know of or are organizing that is relevant to ethnography? Let us know and we’ll share it.
BOOK REVIEW: Is there a book that you would like to see reviewed? Or would you like to review a book?

Send us an email if you have any ideas! ethnographymatters [at sign] gmail [dot] com

Thinking of Social Media as Places

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:09:01 -0400

Heather Ford’s post, New Geographies, on the newly launched blog, Ethnography Matters, is a wonderful read. She asks a really good question - how do we know when we’ve moved from one place to another when we’re online? And why is that the questions we ask about social media, force it into a bad vs good dichotomy?

*btw - do subscribe to Ethnography Matters! Heather was the wonderful mastermind behind this blog that I am also proud to be a part of the team!

I have taken an excerpt from the post below:

And if what defines a place is its signposts, its boundaries, the taken-for-granted ways of doing things, the expected and the unexpected, what are the equivalents in online spaces? How do we know that we have left one space and arrived at another? How does the experience of outsiders (or n00bs) differ from that of locals?

This new way of thinking about social media (new for me, at least) came about when I was asked to speak at a conference about the ‘crucial role of social media’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. Buried in the description of the session was the question: ‘Does what happened in the London Riots diminish the power of social media?’ As I thought about what to say and what was expected of me, it struck me that the problem with the current way questions around social media are framed is that they require defining technological artefacts as good or bad, when it might be more appropriate to talk about technology as a place where good and bad things can, and do, happen.

If we frame social media as places, we can understand more fully the role of people in those places, rather than talking about the technical characteristics of Facebook or Wikipedia as determining a particular type of behaviour. Looking only at the “bad” privacy features of Facebook, for example, we are tempted to assume that “privacy is dead” because of the “forced sharing” that is happening through changes in the technology. But this view fails to represent the ways that people self-censor or move to more intimate spaces in order to protect their privacy, something I noticed in my study of privacy in an educational context, for example.

Mark Graham, Internet geographer from the Oxford Internet Institute, asks the question: ‘What is the geography of articles in the Middle East and North Africa, and how does this compare to the rest of the world?’

Framing social media as places enables us to realise how we move between platforms (for example, Facebook and Google+) not only because of the new shiny gadgets we find there, but because of the people who inhabit those spaces. It is the flow of people and practices that defines the place as much as it is its landscape and architectural features. Facebook, for example, is defined by particular boundaries (my page, your page, a photograph that belongs to a particular group), taken-for-granted ways of doing things that define deviance and compliance among particular groups (don’t friend your teacher, don’t send too many updates and flood your friends’ streams, don’t tag drunk pictures of friends) and artefacts (the activity stream, wall and photo albums) that, taken together, define the place.

It seems kind of obvious when you think about it, and it isn’t a new way of thinking about technology: we’ve been talking about going online and migrating from different operating systems for a while. But the fact that we’re surprised that Google+ isn’t currently teeming with people, or that more Kenyans aren’t contributing to Swahili Wikipedia, or that women make up such a small percentage of Wikipedia edits suggests that we are thinking too much of social media as things rather than as places. If we thought about Google+ as a big, shiny, new complex, we’d begin to understand that people won’t necessarily move there just because the technology is better when few of their friends are there.

The key aspect that we miss in thinking of social sites as technological artefacts is that we tend to ignore culture and power – two really big and slippery aspects of what makes certain types of people have certain types of conversations in particular online spaces, and of what defines who feels welcome or unwelcome to participate. It has caused us to define Wikipedia or Facebook at a level of granularity that isn’t deep enough to really get an understanding of what is happening there, where the power is located and how we might engineer to encourage particular creations and conversations. This is not just about understanding the affordances of the software. In order to understand Wikipedia collaboration, I can’t only look at the MediaWiki software – in the same way that to understand Kenya, I couldn’t just read about its legal framework or look at the statistics about the country. Being there, experiencing how people to speak to me, noticing what the signposts say and what they leave out, is part of the necessarily long journey toward a full understanding of the place.

An example of why culture and design matter for the user - it's in the details

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:04:00 -0400

P1120774 on Flickr.

An Xiao Mina’s latest post about seat numbers in China is a great example of how design that attempts to understand the user’s world matters. She explains in her post why there is no 12E in this photo:

Contrary to intuition for English speakers, seats 12F and 12D are next to each other on the train. Why no 12E? After some time, I realized it’s because the letter E sounds like the number 1 in Chinese.

Without awareness of how the letter E sounds in this context, any designer (Chinese speaking or non-Chinese speaking) could easily overlook this very minor detail that would great confusion for a person who is looking for their seat.

Minimizing unintentional confusion in design requires attention to the details. This is why ethnography and user studies are important.

"Developers are realizing that they can deliver amazing experiences when they understand more about..."

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:07:13 -0400

“Developers are realizing that they can deliver amazing experiences when they understand more about the user. However, users today are careful to not give away too much of that information.”

- The impact of Apple’s Siri release: From the former lead iPhone developer of Siri

"Siri is basically a contextual, semantic, personalized search engine. We affectionately called it a..."

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:07:11 -0400

“Siri is basically a contextual, semantic, personalized search engine. We affectionately called it a “Do” engine. A search engine can evaluate text strings and look for matching results. A “Do” engine maintains awareness of the user and everything it knows about that user and processes strings in the context of the user.”

- The impact of Apple’s Siri release: From the former lead iPhone developer of Siri

"More than ten years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil,..."

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:08:39 -0400

“

More than ten years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy’s top ten - but not until 2040.

Skip forward a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is at number seven, India tenth - and even Russia is creeping closer. In purchasing power parity, or PPP, things look even better. There, China is in second place, India is now fourth, Russia sixth, and Brazil seventh.

No wonder Jim O’Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that “the world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the US and Europe”.

”

- Will Asia save global capitalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

"The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:02:05 -0400

“The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

- Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

No other essay has informed the way in which I understand and articulate the digital space more than this essay by Foucault. If you read nothing else by Foucault, at least read this essay. You will never look at mirrors or boats the same way again.

(via modernandmaterialthings)

A Comedic & Educational Film Poking Fun At Ethnography I am...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:53:00 -0400

A Comedic & Educational Film Poking Fun At Ethnography

I am now assigning Walter Wippersberg’s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich - Dark, Mysterious Austria, to all my students! If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.

Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films poks fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.

“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB

badethnography tell us that at

“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.

Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination, which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”

Often times ethnography can feel so heavy and serious power and culture, power and culture, power and culture. But what does power and culture look like? How do you explain exoticism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism? Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich is a wonderful video to start those conversations because it’s silly! Part of why I love ethnography so much is that it is so fun and I think this is a great reminder for ethnographers to laugh a bit at ourselves. In all of our musing over the practice and theory of ethnography, we’ve got to remember that we live in a wonderfully silly world and how lovely it is that we live in a period where we get to play all day in collecting knowledge of “man,” a la Foucault.

I don’t think i could ever visit the Alps of Austria without constantly thinking of this video.

UPDATE: Also check out Kitchen Stories, a Swedish film about an ethnographic study on kitchens. It’s a comedy. You can buy the DVD on amazon and watch 2 clips here. Thanks Leila Takayama for the tip!

via badethnography

Pairing Academic Research with Visual Materials - Dan Lockton's Research & Design with Intent Toolkit

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:14:00 -0400

Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring.

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them. The toolkit brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a number of psychological disciplines, illustrated with examples, to enable designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems.

I always love keeping an eye on thinkers whose work engages with academia and industry. Like Christina Dennaoui, Leila Takayama, Danah Boyd, Barry Brown, Laura Watts, Paco Underhill, Nicholas Nova, Julian Bleeker, Lyn Jeffery, Jane Fulton Suri, Ian Bogost, Sam Ladner, John Battelle, and James Landay. I try to learn from their work because they draw on academic research yet communicate their thoughts without the academic jargon.

I now have to add Don Lockton to the list!

- - - - - - -

Lately, I have been dreaming up of a visual component to my dissertation when I write it up next year after I finish my fieldwork in China. I have a collection of small books, pamphlets, guides, and materials from organizations that give me inspiration for my creation.

One of my favorite examples is Laura Watt’s ethnographic work on Orkney Islands in Scotland. We were both guest lecturing at Irina Shklovski’s seminar at IT University in Copenhagen, and Laura gave an amazing presentation about her research. In addition to her talk, she passed around a fieldwork tool kit that created to help clients understand her research. I remember that her research was one of the first and few times (to date) where I can hear the word “innovation” and not roll my eyes. She created a beautiful book of stories and poems about possible futures of Orkney Islands and a digital booklet about the future scenarios of infrastructure.

Oh and another super cool project coming out of academic research is Reframing Mexico City, an interactive website from University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Tecnologico de Monterrey. To create part one of the scenarios on the website, UNC & TM students used data collected from UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies’ (CCIS) interviews with Mexican immigrants on how they crossed the border into the US (research led by Leah Muse-Orlinoff). Data from the interviews were used to convey the perils and experiences of clandestine border crossing in Tijuana, Tecate, and Sasabe. Then users on the website actually have the opportunity to experience the border crossing - they get to “make decisions about where they would like to cross, how much they want to pay a coyote, and what to do when confronted with certain obstacles such as apprehension by the border patrol, extreme climatic conditions, and injury.” This is an excellent example of how academic research can be turned into story-telling and creating empathetic experiences.

Well, now I get to add Lockton’s toolkit to my collection! He (and David Harrison, Neville A. Stanton) created a wiki for the toolkit where you can download the cards and purchase a set.

Reading his dissertation summary reminds me of all the educational toolkits that I created for workshop that I led before I started my PhD. (I created conferences and workshop for educators on how to incorporate popular culture like hip-hop into educational curricula, and how to use new media in after-school programs in low-income communities.)

While my dissertation is vastly different from Lockton’s and making a toolkit does not make sense (at least for now), it’s inspiring to see how it could be done. It makes me excited to figure out the appropriate tools to create when it comes to my dissertation!

- - - - - - -

Aside from creating a lovely tangible set of materials, Lockton’s dissertation has intellectual teeth. His primary research questions is:

Can industrial designers use the Design with Intent toolkit to apply insights from other disciplines (psychology, ergonomics, architecture, human-computer interaction, behavioural economics) to generate novel, realistic design concepts, addressing briefs on influencing user behaviour, primarily to reduce the environmental impact of technology use, but also in other social benefit contexts?

One field to add to the disciplines that he’s mentioned is Sociology! While psychology helps you understand beliefs that influence user behavior from an individual’s point of view, sociology takes a more meta approach by situating beliefs that influence the user from a communal point of view.

Drawing on sociology would compliment Lockton’s last section that seeks to understand designers’ and users’ mental models about technological systems. Sociological research on culture and group interaction can be incredibly useful to answering how mental models affect designers. Mental models are culturally grounded. As such, one has to understand the broader context of the society that that the designer AND user is embedded in to really get at this question.

Now I already anticipate some academic purists arguing that Lockton’s dissertation is super normative - he’s explicitly trying to change user behavior, or that his work is too subjective - like creating his own index of measurement for his own products, or that it just isn’t academic to do a dissertation on something that one invented for industry use. But that’s really not fair to say this. Physicists, geneticists, or educators come up with their theories or ideas all the time and test it out with their dissertation. And just because research is normative form the get-go doesn’t mean that this isn’t legitimate academic research. Lockton is explicit in his research questions, and I think that is most important. Whereas many of academic research is hidden in super jargony language that is trying to prove something they already believe in, but hiding it under the cloak of reflexivity. Reflexivity is a mirage (according to Mike Lynch).

Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!

Creating A Digital Experience tied to Physical Space with minimal Cultural Contingencies: Tesco's Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:53:00 -0400

Tesco’s Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea is a great example of how to create a service based on existing user practices, rituals, and needs.

Behind the accessible yet super advertising-agency language of this marketing video is an example of great ethnography! (ignore their subjective claims that South Koreans are the 2nd hardest working people in the world- forgive Chiel - they are a marketing agency!)

Tesco’s advertising company, Chiel, observed existing user interactions and feelings around grocery stores. They took into account that South Korea is one of the most digitally wired and smartphone saturated phones in the world. They also noted user’s everyday transportation experience.

Based on their observations and understanding of real world context, they came up with the virtual subway store that only requires the use of a smartphone.

What I love about this innovative service is that it doesn’t introduce too many contingencies or new practices.

1. There aren’t any infrastructural contingencies around digital literacy or hardware issues - smartphone penetration is super high and mobile signal is consistent and widespread under- and above-ground.

2. Homeplus is also being introduced into an existing ritual - the morning and post-work subway commute.

Part of this is ritual physical- the action of going to the subway and waiting for the subway is familiar.
Part of this ritual is digital - the continuous browsing on one’s mobile while waiting and riding the train.
Another part of this ritual is mental - the accounting of daily tasks that need to get done like buying more toilet paper or eggs. Urban and working South Koreans already in these physical, digital, and mental activities.

3. There are already high levels of trust in online shopping in South Korea - so introducing this virtual service is something that complements beliefs about the internet.

A new contingency that comes to my mind is the delivery of the items - like people need to get used to the practice of arranging delivery. Like working out what time the products are delivered and how to time the delivery so that you get your items when you come home from your commute. But delivery issues can be solved relatively easily on the back end by working out database and coordination issues and building in flexibility for the user. Delivery is not a big cultural or mental contingency in this context.

The most difficult services/products to introduce are ones that require cultural or mental pivots along with new practices. If Tesco were to introduce the virtual service in a country with high bandwidth penetration but low trust in online shopping, then they are running up against a perception issue - that the internet is good for many activities, but not shopping.

Another outstanding aspect to note is that this service may not have been created if the designers didn’t take into account existing transportation patterns. If Chiel only did their observations inside the grocery store or inside a home, they wouldn’t have realized the potential for creating a service inside the subway - an everyday space. But now this everyday space has a new and exciting activity - shopping! This interaction in this space becomes more rich and complex. The subway space isn’t just a transportation, people watching, or casual gaming space, it is a consumption space now - thus introducing consumption desires into this activity.

The success of Homeplus fulfills the qualities that are critical for a seamless user experience - SUD: Simple, Usable, and Desirable

I want to comment a bit on desireability. Dan Lockton’s research on how architecture influences user behavior introduced me an urban planning concept of “desire paths,” that users create natural paths in their physical surroundings based on what works for them. Lockton points to Myhill (2004) who suggests that ““[a]n optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all.”

Myhill argues that companies who design products should allow for desire paths to emerge out of the user, not the designer. The company should them keep an eye on the desire paths and make adjustments or features based on these emergent paths. Myhill says that companies who do this will successfully fulfill the ‘Normanian Natural Selection,” a theory from Don Norman that people always interact naturally with objects and spaces in their everyday life.

Applying “desire paths” to Homeplus virtual grocery stores, could the appeal and success of it be partly based on that the system allows for users to create symbolic “desire paths”? It would be so fascinating to do some ethnography to see how over the next few years, Homeplus calibrates their service to allow for users to create desire paths - because this keeps this service flexible for the user! What kind of desire paths will emerge out of this service?

I ask these questions about desire paths with my fieldwork in China in mind - because I’m thinking about how youth and migrants are using social media to create symbolic desire paths to get to the information they need. But more on that in another post!

——-

I would bet Chiel included South Koreans on the design team. I know this may sound like the obvious - but MANY companies that hire design firms to create products/services for them DO NOT include local ethnographers/designers on the project. So while the design ideas they create may be amazing (or totally unimpressive), they may not be grounded in existing social practices. Or what happens is that companies will hire a local ethnographer or expert, but they don’t allow the local ethnographer to be in a position of power that is equal to other team members, so the local expert’s suggestions often get sidelined.

Thank you to Charlotte Yong San Gullach Büttrich for sharing this with me on Google+!

(video via Recklessnutter)

"As social actors we expect authenticity in others, and in ourselves. In a time of constant..."

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:00:06 -0400

“As social actors we expect authenticity in others, and in ourselves. In a time of constant documentation, our online personas become our reflections, and they must not only be ideal, but also truthful. As such, we do not document falsehoods, but preemptively create documentable situations in an effort to present a self that is simultaneously ideal and authentic.”

- From “Theory Meets Methods: Data & The Authentic Cyborg Self”

(via modernandmaterialthings)

"In terms of internet research, multi-sited ethnography – in particular Marcus’s tracking strategy of..."

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:06 -0400

“In terms of internet research, multi-sited ethnography – in particular Marcus’s tracking strategy of “following the thing,” can provide a methodological approach that accounts for the role of material objects (technologies, artifacts, media) in describing social processes that are constituted in and articulated through sociotechnical practices. Conventionally, ethnographic research has concentrated primarily on the role of human actors in meaning-making processes. While documents and artifacts have certainly been part of ethnographic projects, those objects have often been examined as the product, and not a co-producer of, culture. The result is that technology often plays a limited role in understanding social practices, a point Bruno Latour makes arguing that technical objects are the “missing masses” in social science (1992).”

- Walker, Dana M. (2010) The Location of Digital Ethnography, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (via dan3)

Leila Takayama's 5 suggestions for designers

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 02:09:00 -0400

I met human-robotics interaction researcher, Leila Takayama, in Palo Alto over yummy Korean food when I was working with Nokia. She is truly awesome. Leila is a prolific researcher who is truly committed to her furthering intellectual dialogue between private and academic sector.

And plus - we both think James Landay gives great advice : )

reblogged via Pasta & Vinegar:

“What are 5 things all designers should know?

1. People respond to many interactive technologies in ways that they respond to people, even when they won’t admit it or can’t recognize it. (See: The Media Equation)

2. There is often a gap between how people reflectively talk about an interactive product and what they actually do in the moment of interacting with that product. Know which of those matters to you.

3. What is perceived can be more important what is objectively true when it comes to how people embrace and engage with interactive objects.

4. It really does not take much for an interactive product to seem like it has its own agency and apparent intentions. (See: Heider & Simmel demonstrations) 5. Under promise and over deliver on user expectations.“