It design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science
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- 1.7.1Ethnography
- 1.7.1.1Work
- 1.7.1.2Ethnographic orientation
- 1.7.1.3Social study of amateur work and technology
- 1.7.1.4Debates on Ethnography in CSCW
- 1.7.2Participatory design
- 1.7.2.1Theoretical base according to Ehn
- 1.7.2.2PD and voluntary work
1.7MethodsResearch described here used a combination of ethnography and participatory design. Ethnographically-inspired study of amateur work and technology is employed to learn about the ways in which amateurs in general and volunteer students in particular do work, devise IT tools to support their work and put these tools to use. Participatory design was then used to devise new tools together with the students. 1.7.1EthnographyThe two field studies described in this thesis were conducted used an ethnographically-inspired approach to study voluntary work and technology. Non-employed work is still little understood in CSCW. There is, to date, no CSCW account of amateur work as introduced here. To gain more understanding of its nature, incentives, relations with technology and other features, more detail needs to be added to the existing CSCW corpus of work study. 1.7.1.1WorkTo justify our interest in what was termed as “amateur work”, a discussion of the “work” term is needed. What exactly constitutes work has been hard to define within sociology. Grint (1991) comments on work as follows: Work tends to be an activity that transforms nature and is usually undertaken in social situations, but exactly what counts as work is dependent on the specific social circumstances under which such activities are undertaken and, critically, how these circumstances and activities are interpreted by those involved. (Grint 1991, page 7) There are thus many kinds of work and one cannot define work in general, without considering a certain social setting. Finding out about work is an empirical task. What constitutes work for the members5 of the setting under study is then the approach to understanding work that Grint proposes, and ethnographic orientation concurs. 1.7.1.2Ethnographic orientationWithout claiming to be as strict and detailed about accounting for social order as ethnomethodological ethnography, the ethnographic orientation used here and in other CSCW field studies draws from the following guiding principles:
In attempting to account for the working order of the setting by using the member categories, ethnography is resisting premature theorising. This theoretical scepticism will be exemplified later on in the works of Suchman and Button. Taking an ethnographic orientation implies to understand how work is done and related to technology, not only what is being accomplished. Given the situation of little study of amateur work in both CSCW and sociology, approaching amateur work with an ethnographic orientation, like in the research reported here, is suitable due to the attention paid by ethnographic methods to the work detail, in situ and in vivo. 1.7.1.3Social study of amateur work and technologyAs we will see, terms like “work”, “workshop”, “working group” are ubiquitous in the member language of the settings studied. For them, their activity constitutes work, which we will refer to as amateur work. There will be a special focus on ‘technology in amateur work order’: in every amateur setting studied, the technology used will be considered in detail. Besides the inherent importance of technology as aid to work, further reason and perspective for studying technology is given by the assumption that, in order to understand how to do good design for amateur settings, we must learn more on how such settings design for themselves (even if they might not consciously and specifically refer to the act of shaping technology as ‘design’). It is intuitively clear that without a wage incentive, bad design will be sanctioned by volunteers. In that sense, examination of a historical account of how designs of IT and other artefacts have evolved in the context of the work that we learn about with an ethnographic orientation, can give a valuable insight for further design for amateur settings. As such, a number of technologies will be considered with a historical, ‘evolutionary’ perspective in the settings studied, in order to understand the rationale that lead to their design. Each ethnographically oriented account presented here will have two parts:
1.7.1.4Debates on Ethnography in CSCWIn ‘scientific method’ terms, ethnography can appear as a puzzling method at first. Issues like the (often) lack of theoretical modelling of the studied site, internal and external validity, repeatability of inquiry, lack of possibility to assess the quality of the data using statistical analysis all make a ‘traditional’ scientist find it hard to understand just how an ethnographic study can be of use to any research discipline. Kuhn (1962) would probably argue that the traditional scientist ‘lives in a different paradigm’ than the ethnographer. However, it is easy to foresee the difficulties in ‘constraining’ a social setting in order to carry out a traditional, repeatable ‘controlled experiment’, with strict control over independent variables and experimental treatment, and reliable measuring of dependent variables. Since CSCW mostly asks questions involving groups (which are hard not to be regarded as situated social settings in the sense suggested by Suchman, 1987), the field is likely to run often into this problem, hence it is difficult to ignore ethnography as a methodological option. Nevertheless, the practical issue of how to go from ethnographic detail to design recommendation remains (see e.g. Hughes et al. 1994). Plowman, Rogers and Ramage (1995) ask this question directly in their title: “What are workplace studies for?”. They contend that “fieldworkers are only too aware that their practical offerings are meagre and commonsensical comparing with their rich and poetic accounts of the workplace”. They exemplify classical workplace studies such as the one reported by Heath and Luff (1992) that CSCW has learned important lessons from (i.e. peripheral awareness) but the particular design implications made by the paper were all but forgotten. The agreement by Plowman et al. that “workplace studies carried out primarily to understand a particular working practice are making a valuable contribution to the body of CSCW knowledge in their own right” is encouraging for our quest to account for amateur working practice. They show that many ethnographic studies count as ‘basic research’ for CSCW (e.g. the classical Suchman, 1987 which, as expected by Hughes et al. 1991, impacted both CSCW and the contributing discipline of sociology), “informing CSCW design through raising awareness of important conceptual issues and questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about work activities and how they should be supported”. The ‘Lancaster CSCW group’ have been involved in long-term ethnographic workplace studies accompanied by design. Hughes et al. (1994) present several practical problems with ethnography in system design. The attention to detail is hard to scale beyond a small group, to organisational level. The long time taken to acquire understanding of working order makes ethnography hardly applicable in today’s software engineering practices and project pace. Finally, the role of the ethnographer in a more commercial setting is problematic since ethnography is committed not to disrupt the setting while much of the motivation of IT is to reorganise work. Related to ‘IT as reorganisation of work’, Grudin and Grinter (1995) saw the debate between Suchman and Winograd as a dialog between a conservative ethnographer and a daring designer. They contend that, due to their grounding in the current practice, both ethnography and participatory design (reviewed below) will tend to come up with conservative design implications (“the ethnographer’s dilemma”, further discussed by Button and Dourish, 1996). As such, Grudin and Grinter claim, revolutionary designs, with a large impact are not likely to be results of such methods (but see Whittaker, Terveen and Nardi 2000, for a criticism of the majority of HCI publications proposing inventions instead of building on prior work). However, ethnography and participatory design are widely viewed as an integrated work-oriented approach used to acquire a detailed understanding of the work order in the setting (ethnography), and then to do design for the setting in close cooperation with its members (participatory design).
For Ehn, design is “the dialectics of tradition and transcendence”, a definition that encompasses a careful balance between the existing and the new. Heideggerian being-in-the-world and throwness (discussed shortly in 1.6.2.2) provide a perspective on the individual use of artefacts, while the social context of design and use is seen through a Marxist notion of “dialectical emancipatory practice”. While the Heideggerian approach provides a perspective on the local artefact use and the Marxist approach brings a perspective on the more global-social context, communication and interaction in the design process is understood with Wittgensteinian language-game glasses. For design to be effective, the designers and the users must build and share a common ‘language game’ (and indeed, a “form of life”), developed in design-by-doing. Design has a language game of its own but that should have enough family resemblance with the language-game in which the design is intervening. As a common point of the three foundational perspectives, Ehn notes great similarities to the understanding of acquisition of skill (related to Wittgensteinian understanding of ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘creativity’). Based on these foundations, Ehn discusses design as both art and science (echoed by e.g. Winograd 1996), design throughout the software development cycles (not just an initial phase of ‘specification’) and in use, “the tool perspective” on the computer artefact (emphasizing the skilled worker as being in control of the tool, as opposed to the new artefact leading to de-skilling) and the “collective resource approach” that assigns trade unions a specific role in design. 1.7.2.2PD and voluntary workHaving reviewed the foundations of participatory design and its political agenda, we can reflect on its suitability for design for voluntary work, based on immediately apparent features of such work, most importantly on the absence of a wage incentive. There are two contradictory kinds of reasoning we can make at this point (in advance of field study, and without participatory design practice). First, a wage incentive (or actually fear of losing that job and wage) can sometimes be the only motivation of a user to keep using a system although she or he does not like its features. The risk of such a system being rejected in the context of voluntary work is thus intuitively higher. This makes PD a preferred choice for design in a voluntary setting: the design is done together with users, paying careful attention to the working order as it was achieved by members. Second, the wage incentive is structurally connected to the employer-employee tension resulting in class struggle, an essential concept of Marxism, and the source of conflict as an essential of participatory design (see Bødker 1996 for a discussion of conflict). Absence of class struggle can be regarded as reducing the fundamental Marxist tension between tradition and transcendence. However, many PD instances do not strongly connect PD to a political agenda in general and to issues of class struggle in special. Download 0.67 Mb. Share with your friends:
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