I must admit that although I say that technology usage is grounded in a cultural context, I struggle to operationalize “culture” for the fear of reducing it to some causal variable or some vague concept that dilutes what I am arguing. I haven’t found much solace in sociology’s linear models that isolate “culture’s” effects - as it repeats the whole divide of structure versus agency. Neither have I found much clarity in the interpretive tradition of culture, not because I don’t agree with it, but because am confused at how to methodologically move forward with an interpretive approach.

Well then came my meeting with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh, Assoc. Director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) (thanks for gloria mark for the introduction!).

Prof. Venkatesh has created methodology magic!
Ethno-consumerism is a methodology for doing cross-cultural research. It encourages the researcher to “study culture not merely as providing the context for the study of consumer behavior but study consumption itself as culturally constituted behavior. “In principle, the ethnoconsumerist perspective goes beyond the distinction of emic and etic research approaches.” The etic approach encourages the researcher to interpret from her/his point of view. On the other hand, the emic approach tells the researcher to look at the subject’s point of view. But ethnoconsumerism advocates for the next critical step, which is to then develop knowledge from subject’s point of view. “The research becomes more than an etic interpretation (researcher’s point of view) of the culture, but a view of the culture informed by the culture itself as demonstrated by the above” (Venkatesh and Meamber, 1997).

Venkatesh makes clear that this is methodology, not a method. It does not seek to promote any data collection methods.
Of course I think that qualitative methods (or a mixed-method approach of qual + quant) is the best way to arrive at what he is saying is the crux of ethnoconsumerism - developing a cultural framework of analysis from the consumer’s point of view.

Read his paper and other writings here.

I highly encourage you to read his 1995 paper below on Ethnoconsumerism (citation below). It’s a beautifully written paper that feels intellectually and spiritually moving at the same time. When I read it I felt as if the words has fallen out of the sky onto self-organizing fractals of joy. After 3 years of sociology coursework, I’ve become averse at times to theories by sociologists because the words just don’t stick in my brain or they just don’t inspire me anymore. There was something this 1995 piece that helped me deconstruct 3 years of wonderful and hellish sociological self-discovery to even learn about the cultural divide within the field of sociology (culture vs structure or culture as interpretive model). Dr. Venkatesh, coming from a business/economics background, beautifully reconstructs all the various authors of the interpretive tradition who I have come to love. He has inspired me to think of these authors - such as Geertz, in a new way for my own work on new technology users.

I will be thinking about this methodology for a while as I try to figure out if this framework makes sense for my dissertation. So I will be writing more about this model. In the meantime, two things come to my mind: how I can apply this for my research and how this intersects with Stuart Halls, et. al. 1997 book on Sony Walkmans.

How do I apply this this my research?

• study how new users use their technology as culturally constituted behavior.
• look at tech usage as  set of practices
• Do not treat new tech users as objects.
• Do not treat their practices as economically motivated.
• People use techology to get things done. It is my job to understand as an outsider what is being “done” in their context.
• Don’t be culturally reductive by picking one feature of the culture and anchoring all analysis around the feature.
• If I want to compare two different regions with a cultural framework - this takes a realllllly long time because I have to understand the cultural categories and experiences of all the sites.

Circuit of Culture
In 1997, Stuart Hall, Paul Du Gray, and Linda James published Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. They created a model for the analysis of cultural objects called the circuit of culture. On page 3, they show this graph below. The book walks one through on how to deconstruct the Sony walkman as a cultural object.

In an upcoming post, I would like to discuss ways I could combine Ethnoconsumerism and the Circuit of Culture to work for my research. What’s interesting is that while both authors are talking about objects and the people who use the, these are two slightly different approaches. I want to think about to spatialize these approaches. I need to give this some more thought so until the next post on this!

Suggested Reading:

Gay PD, Hall S, Janes L. Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE; 1997.

Easterly W. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press; 2006.

“Ethnoconsumerism: A New Paradigm to Study Cultural and Cross-cultural Consumer Behavior,” Alladi Venkatesh. Marketing in a Multicultural World, J.A. Costa and G. Bamossy (eds.), SAGE Publications, 1995, 26-67.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to understand how ethnographically driven research is different from market research.  While I intuitively understood the differences between the two, I didn’t take the time to fully sort it out.

I finally found someone who not only clearly explains the differences, but provides greater clarity and depth to my understanding of design research.

I love the way Panthea Lee of reBoot  contrasts market research and design research in, Design Research: What Is It and Why Do It? Panthea explains that the primary difference is that market research treats people as consumers - wage earners with an income to dispose on a product or service, while design research treats people as users  - humans who are trying to fulfill everyday needs through what means they see as possible.

“Market research identifies and acts upon optimal market and consumer leverage points to achieve success. Its definition of success is not absolute, though metrics are often financial. Design research, on the other hand, is founded in the belief that we already know the optimal market and consumer leverage points: human needs. Unearthing and satisfying those needs is thus the surest measure of success. Through this process, we earn people’s respect and loyalty.”

Panthea’s essay doesn’t put a value judgement on market research, rather it makes the boundaries between both types of research more explicit. This clarity allows researchers the space to be explicit about when they are wearing the market research or the design research hat. Sometimes a project needs to be considered from a market and a design perspective. So this is when this chart below becomes super useful!

Reading Panthea’s essay gave me an “AHA” moment - it’s a rare brain moment when you discover a new theory or a new thinker or a new perspective.  Before reading her essay, everything was messy in my head - it kinda looked like this below - lots of circles with appendages and overlapping fields:

These are all the fields that have influenced my research interests.

• Sociology - theory, community, intra-personal communication, class, power, digital divide, network society, mobility, cultural studies, geography, communication, new media, migration, cities, digital divide, class
• Ethnography - Anthropology, methods, follow the object, stories
• Human Computer Interaction (HCI) - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Ubicomp, ethnomethdology, psychology,
• Design Thinking: Technology Usability, Business feasibility, Human Values, User Experience, products, services, design
• User Experience - professional work, testing, focus groups, design
• Market Research - consumers, trends, predictions, advertising, brands, personas

But something was missing. I couldn’t figure out how to connect my sociological and design interests to my previous work as a community organizer and digital media consultant with low-income communities. I came across public sociology and ICT4D, but those didn’t make things more clear.

But I get it now! I understood how my ethnographic skills, theoretical interests, and social passion intersect at the nexus of design research! I want to respond to people’s needs, not just a company’s needs or even intellectual/theoretical needs.  Design research doesn’t exclude market or intellectual research, it simply prioritizes the user’s needs first and foremost. As the co-founder, Zac Brisson says in Why Services?:

At Reboot, we like theory — sociopolitical, socioeconomic, you name it — as much as the next social enterprise. But we are also practitioners, working hand-in-hand with governments, international organizations, non-profits, and the private sector on realizing social change. We understand and support the role of advocacy and policy — some of us still bear battle scars from past lives in these arenas — but as an organization, we are more concerned with the moments where the rubber meets the road. With those tangible points where outcomes are made.

Hence our fixation on creating better services.

From what I’ve seen of reBoot’s projects, they involve technology, but they don’t seem to do this at the expense of the users. In my own research on social uses of technology, I am super critical of institutional or programmatic efforts that priortize the technology over users or that treat technology as the magical solution. Panthea also shares a similar view. In an article about ReBoot, ‘Iterate, iterate, iterate’: Reboot re-thinks social service delivery through design,” she says:

“There is greater power in citizens’ hands right now, as a result of changes in technology over the past couple of decades. I think the challenge is – you have one group who wants technology as the solution, as a silver bullet. One of the hardest parts about what we do is trying to talk people away from technology as a default. There’s a lot of talk around ICT4D – information and communications technology for development. Technology becomes central to programming. We’re trying to talk people away from that.”

I couldn’t agree with Panthea more on the point she made.

A common theme on Cultural Bytes is my critique of any ICT4D-like efforts because it doesn’t go far enough in prioritizing users’ culture or needs. There is a lot of money in programs that propose technological solutions and it is difficult to ask people to consider to step back when their mind is already set or when donors have already committed millions in funding. What’s sad is that so much money is wasted on developing technologies without the user in mind or with misleading assumptions about their needs. A thoroughly authentic implementation of design research approach would help prevent this from happening.

Some other reasons why I love design research:

1.) absolutely cares about users to the core with great compassion and working with them to develop real-world services to implement
2.) values research - deep research - qual and quant
3.) values spending time on analysing the data to develop insights
4.) creates concrete services to test out of research - output is actionable
5.) puts in time to builds testing into their process but doesn’t waste time in ongoing testing, create what Panthea calls “evidence-based decision-making
6.) projects are tied to evaluation that is based on user fulfillment
7.) prioritizes listening before doing

I’m really excited to think about how to use design research for my personal goals of

• wanting to work alongside  low-income/marginalized communities to create the lives they want to live
• bringing more compassion and awareness for their everyday lives

So design research is a new topic that I will be blogging about on Cultural Bytes! yahh to new ideas! And big thanks to David Sasaki for blogging about reBoot in his blogpost,  [Youth Unemployment] What Mexico and the USA Can Learn from Austria. I am beyond happiness to find such a smart, considerate, and compassionate organization.

You can read more about reBoot and follow the co-founders on twitter:  Panthea Lee, Zac Brisson

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.