Genevieve Bell from Intel said, “It’s based on the idea that you can best absorb a culture by being there and doing it. An old professor of mine called it ‘deep hanging out.’” AQR defines ethnography as “Originating in anthropology, this term traditionally refers to a practice in which researchers spend long periods living within a culture in order to study it. The term has been adopted within qualitative market research to describe occasions where researchers spend time - hours, days or weeks - observing and/or interacting with participants in areas of their everyday lives.” Depending on where you are - ethnography is either the ‘in’ thing or the ‘old’ thing. ( Maybe once it’s in HBR it’s possibly not the new new things anymore). At its best - it leads to an understanding of people in context. At its worst it can lead to some surreal circumstances. Let me paint you a picture - you turn up at someone’s home in Jakarta which is now very very clean. There is a participant, some very well dressed family members keen to see what is happening. There is a camera person, a local researcher, a translator, an international researcher, and six people from interested parties (could be six Americans, Koreans, Japanese etc). Whatever it is - natural behaviours are not going to happen. There are a wide range of methods used under the name of ethnography- shadowing, diaries, lead user research, immersion, passive video camera recording, day in the life, intercepts, observation, user led documentation or video, sms interactions and blogs.
But there are some people writing and publishing on the internet some of their learnings:
Grant McCracken is an anthropologist, blogger and author and has been a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. His site has interesting pieces including “How to be an anthropologist for hire”
Future Perfect is a site by Jan Chipchase about the collision of people, society and technology, drawing on issues related to the design research that I conduct in part, on behalf of his employer - Nokia. He has generously uploaded presentations and the photos are impressive.
Logic + Emotion is a blog by David Armano is who is VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass. The diagrams he creates which you can see in his blog set the bar for the rest of us.
You can download a primer on the AIGA site, produced in collaboration with Cheskin, on ethnography. Cheskin’s blog is here.
Conversations with Dina has useful links, and reflections of a qual researcher who uses ethnographic methods in India.
Everyday Lives - Siamack Salari set up the Culture Lab and then Everyday Lives which is known for video ethnography
There is a presentation to download on Ethnography from a client perspective from Langerqual. Judy Langer presented this last year at AMA.
Finally, a quote from Genevieve Bell,” There are lots of cultures in Asia, where the idea of the ‘individual’ is often trumped by other forms of personhood - where people think more about themselves as members of families and households, than they do as self-defining individuals. This has interesting implications on the notion of technology ownership. In Indonesia, for instance, rather than individually owned cell phones, I met at least one family, where they share all their phones. You take whatever phone is charged and has money on it - individual numbers do not link to individuals but rather to whole households. The connection is between social networks rather than individuals. It truly challenges ideas of how we communicate. ” Click here for the whole interview. Click here for the research released by Intel.
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