Reading and Interpreting Ethnography

Although ethnographic methods are still regarded, to an extent, as new aspects of HCI research practice, they have been part of HCI research almost since its inception, and certainly since the early 1980s, about the same time as the CHI conference was founded. What, then, accounts for this sense of novelty and the mystery that goes along with it? One reason is that ethnographic methods have generally been associated with what we might call non-traditional settings in relation to HCI’s cognitive science roots, emerging at first particular in organizational studies of collaborative work (in the domain of CSCW), being applied later in studies of alternative interaction patterns in ubiquitous computing, and being associated with domains such as domestic life, experience design, and cultural analysis that have been more recent arrivals on the scene. Another is that ethnographic methods are often associated with forms of analysis and theorizing of human action – ethnomethodology stands out as an example here – that are themselves alien to HCI’s intellectual traditions and which have not always been clearly explained. Indeed, debates within the field have often founded on these sorts of confusions, so that in the internecine battles amongst social theorists, ethnographic methods suffer collateral damage (e.g. Crabtree et al. 2009). Finally, in a discipline that has often proceeded with something of a mix-and-match approach, liberally and creatively borrowing ideas and elements from different places, ethnography has often been seen instrumentally as a way of understanding important aspects of technological practice while its own epistemological commitments have remained somewhat murky.