Critical Design Ethnography Running Head: Critical Design Ethnography

Sasha A. Barab²

Michael K. Thomas³

Tyler Dodge³

Markeda Newell³

Kurt Squire³

Indiana University, Bloomington

Please do not duplicate without permission from the authors.

Critical Design Ethnography: Building a Collaborative Agenda

The question of how to engage groups in collaborative work is central to participatory research in which the researcher advocates a change or empowerment agenda while at the same time seeks to understand and build relationships with the community under study. In this type or work, what some refer to as participatory action research, the ethnographer has a goal of empowering groups and individuals, thereby facilitating social change and transformation. In contrast to traditional ethnographic accounts in which the researcher does not seek to change the condition of the community being studied, the researcher’s role in participatory action research takes on a critical stance. The researcher becomes a change agent who is collaboratively developing structures that are intended to support the evolution of the communities being studied. While the ethnographer wants to understand social contexts, the critical ethnographer wants to use this understanding and resultant critique to change them. Our focus, however, was not simply as ethnographers or even critical ethnographers but as instructional designers. Indeed, we were primarily designers who, using a participatory design model, wanted to include potential participants in our design process and understand the contexts in which they participate to develop a multi-user virtual environment to support learning and member empowerment.

At the onset of our work, we believed that the practice of ethnography might help us to carry out a robust needs analysis to inform our design and help us make better software, but we did not appreciate that the relationship that developed through this substantial undertaking could be so rewarding. As we spent increasing amounts of time at particular sites, a Boys and Girls Club located in a Midwestern town and an elementary school in the same town, we became deeply involved in the local dynamics and in relationships with local stakeholders. The tenor of our relationship prompted us to view these particular sites, and contexts more generally, not simply as audiences to adopt our product or intervention. Instead, we began to see contexts as sites constituted by people and cultural modes that were meaningful in their own right. We learned to listen and then talk, placing emphasis on establishing trust, respect, and shared intention rather than simply imposing design. Over time, our focus has shifted, and our team became committed to understanding the participants and their contexts of participation—that is, the resources, structures, and associated practices—with the secondary goal that lessons learned allow us to develop a more useful product prototype.

We began to adopt a method that we now refer to as critical design ethnography. Out of this work we have come to understand two propositions that are of particular relevance to both educational anthropologists and instructional designers. In fact, we view our work as lying at the intersection of educational anthropology and instructional design. The first proposition is that ethnographic methods provide a valuable toolkit to designers who want to develop complex interventions that require local adaptation. Reciprocally, proposition number two is that instructional designers can offer critical anthropologists a methodology for extending the work with a particular case to other contexts. To be sure, we recognize many concerns associated with this proposition. For example, if building a critique with the goal of supporting change as outsider of another culture is not controversial enough, reifying this critique into a designed artifact that ostensibly will be of use to other contexts is potentially naïve and arrogant. While this perspective seems to imply that locally-designed critiques and interventions may be adopted by others in other situations without the risk of imposing imported values and assumptions, we believe that designs transferred to future contexts demand and continually support local reinterpretation.

Our work proceeds with the researcher acting as a participant-observer, a stance that suggests characteristic implications. Finn (1994), reviewing current literature in the fields of action and participatory research, outlines three key elements that distinguish participatory research: 1) people—it is people-centered in that the process of critical inquiry is informed by and responds to experiences and needs of people, especially those belonging to traditionally disenfranchised groups; 2) power—it concerns power and supporting empowerment through the development of common knowledge and critical awareness; and 3) praxis—it recognizes the inseparability of theory and practice and the commitment toward improving both. At the same time, it involves a critical awareness of the personal-political dialectic. The important point is that at the same time as we are building a thick description of the existing context, we are also positioned in a role in which we have a clear agenda and critical expertise to provide service and activities.

Thus, our role of co-designer makes more difficult the role of being research even beyond challenges traditionally associated with naturalistic and ethnographic research (Clifford & Marcus 1986; Geertz 1983; Jackson 1996). In our role of design ethnographers, we move beyond being simply participant observer in that we are change agents with an agenda for supporting local transformation, creating ties to action ethnography (Nilsson 2000), action research (Eden & Huxum 1996; Stinger 1996), Cole’s (1996) utopian methodology, and Engeström’s (1987 1993) developmental work research. This role positions us both outside the organization (what Adler and Adler 1997 referred to as “peripheral membership”) and as a change agent within the organization (having “active membership”).

Changing Contexts. As an example of participatory research, Engeström (1987 1996) has employed an approach that he calls “developmental work research.” In this approach, the researcher works with an organization or institution to understand their system dynamics and then uses activity theory as an analytical tool to develop representations of the state of the system that can be shared with the target population with the reform agenda of highlighting core contradictions. As an outsider, Engeström brings a fresh perspective and particular experiences and resources in characterizing work systems. The resulting representations (new models) are then discussed and refined with members of the target population; then the collective develops a suitable intervention to make the system function more efficiently. More generally, there has been a substantial amount of work in organizational culture theory in which ethnographers are hired to understand the organizational structures and operations with the goal of changing them, in hopes of increasing productivity (Smircich 1983, 1985; Wright 1994; Yanow 2000). By locating learning and change in the organizational culture rather than the individual worker, researchers try to understand how the context and the individual come to transact in ways that facilitate individuals in performing collective work (Yanow 2000). In this manner, it becomes the organizational context that “knows,” and it is that context that is accountable for both the effective and the ineffective actions of the company.

Educational researchers have employed similar interventions to both formal and informal sites for learning. For example, Nilsson (2000) used an approach she called “action ethnography” in an attempt to support a collaborative relationship between a university and a local school. Her role in this project was both to understand the partnership and to bring back to the collaborators the lessons learned. She described her role in facilitating the interaction as “leading with the pinky,” a process in which “the force for change emerged from ‘within’ though with stimulation from ‘outside’” (pp. 12 13). Building on Engeström (1987), she viewed the “pinky work” as expanding the zone of proximal development, referring to “the distance between everyday actions of the individuals and the historically new form of the societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double bind potentially embedded in every day actions” (p. 174). Nilsson’s ethnographic work became an ally that was assembled and employed to stimulate the move from present everyday actions to new forms of activity in the school; that is, her work bridged the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978) between the status quo and a new form of work practice.

To elaborate this point, one may consider that a design bears a range of affordances that, as Gibson (1979) wrote, represent possible actions, regardless of the user’s awareness of them. Perceptually rich media, for example, bear a physiological impact that, while requiring the individual to make sense of the stimuli, nonetheless can either facilitate or impede that interpretive process, depending on a number of factors. Similarly, media affording a perceived sense of presence remain inert, transactionally incomplete, until the individual engages with the media, but again, the impact of the design affects the individual in a consistent bottom-up fashion that occurs in spite of many individual differences (Ekman, 1989; Reeves & Nass, 1996). The converse remains true too, of course: as Norman (1988) explained, affordances require the user to recognize them, to make them actual, and in this paradox lays a dynamic central to instruction design: the human propensity and power to imbue phenomena with meaning reflects not only the nuanced and spirited individual imagination, and not only the vigor of one’s language and culture, but also the evolutionary bedrock we share inescapably (Cosmides & Tooby, 1999; Plutchik, 1980).

A central challenge to instructional designers is to regard such shared psycho-physiological processes not as a deterministic threat to the sentient individual but, rather, as a means through which individuals interpret the world idiosyncratically. As the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1992) wrote, “there is structure in the world, both the physical world and the epistemological world, that places constraints on knowing” (p. 115), yet ironically, these constraining structures in fact make possible the very act of meaning making. Without reviewing the platform of the profession, we hope to have made clear that we regard instructional design as the work of structuring participation, of affording experience, of offering venues through which individuals come together, interact, and come to understand the world.
Study Context

As an example of design ethnography, we have been working on the Quest Atlantis project (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, & Tuzun, in press). Quest Atlantis is a learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks (http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu). Building on strategies from online role-playing games and educationally-focused online communities, Quest Atlantis combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests), talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. A Quest is an engaging curricular task designed to be entertaining yet educational. Completing Quests requires that members participate in real-world, socially and academically meaningful activities, such as conducting environmental studies, researching other cultures, calculating frequency distributions, analyzing newspaper articles, interviewing community members, and developing action plans.

The Quest Atlantis community consists of both the virtual Quest Atlantis space and the face-to-face Quest Atlantis Centers. In order to participate in Quest Atlantis, children must register at a Quest Atlantis Center. Once Questers are registered, they may participate as part of a physical location (i.e., the Boys and Girls Club, as part of dozens of elementary schools around the world) or from libraries or homes, but they are associated with a particular location through their registration. While we nurture the growth of a new community and its associated norms, a central commitment is to collaborate with parents and local schools to ensure that the Quests foster connections to both school work and home life. In other words, our goal was not to simply create an isolated system, but instead to design for a system that is linked into, takes advantage of, and provides support for existing structures already a part of the Questers everyday life in the community, thus promoting broader literacy and authentic praxis (Freire, 1971). The mission of Quest Atlantis is to support children in developing their own sense of purpose as individuals, as members of their communities, and as knowledgeable citizens of the world.

The work on Quest Atlantis began with a year-long ethnography taking place at a local Boys and Girls Club of America and then another one at a local elementary school. The Boys and Girls Club has over 1,000 children using its facilities each year, with over 50% being minorities, and over 75% come from low socio-economic levels. Compaq and Microsoft each donated $100,000 in equipment, software, and service to open a computer room. Quest Atlantis, while beginning in this computer room and at the local elementary school, through funding from the National Science Foundation has expanded to dozens of classrooms, supporting approximately 3000 children from the United States, Australia, Singapore, Denmark, and Sweden in completing thousands of educational activities.

Given our position as critical design ethnographers, we became committed to integrating our design, our participatory design process, and our research methods. Our core commitment has been social, targeting the enrichment and empowerment of the lives of the participants with whom we collaborate (Levinson 1998). At a general level, our process involves four stages: (1) Developing a “thick description” of one or more context(s) – prolonged engagement as participant observer and blurring lines between researcher and researched. (2) Developing a series of social commitments that have local and global significance – co-construction of meanings and belief of some universals. (3) Reifying these understandings and commitments into a design – participatory design and co-evolution and never quite complete. (4) Supporting scaling up and reinterpretation to multiple contexts – flexibly adaptive design and continual mutual adaptation.

Focusing primarily on the methods underlying the first two steps, we have found ourselves proceeding through three interrelated stages, which draw heavily on ethnographic and instructional design methods. Stage one primarily involves ethnographic methods to understand the character of the initial contexts of intervention (Clifford & Marcus 1986; Grills 1998; Silverman 1993). Whereas stage one focuses on characterizing patterns of social action and structure that is currently occurring in the representative sites, stage two focuses on understanding the meaning of the activities for community members. Stage three then involves working with a couple individuals to build personal narratives. Consistent with other ethnographies, the goal is to develop a “thick description,” characterize the four interrelated domains of community life of the initial contexts being researched—ecology, social organization, developmental cycle, and cosmology (Geertz 1976). In stage four we continue to collect data to understand its effectiveness and the challenges of implementation.

These Club and initial elementary school, while partly selected based on convenience, was also purposively selected because of its having certain features such as conveniently located, representative of future contexts, open to collaborating with the research team, and has potential interest in the design (Schwandt, 1996). Consistent with the ethnomethodological approach, extensive observations, various semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and member checking forms the basis of our overall data collection efforts. Other methods were:

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  Activity Analysis – This involves interviewing members individually and collectively about their participation in particular activities, and observing them as they participate in those activities.
  
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  Talking Diaries – These involve asking participants to describe important events in their lives as if they were reading diaries from a certain time period (Levinson, 1996).
  
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  Personal Documentaries – This has involved having participants take pictures of important events in their life and then narrating them orally or in written form (Segal, 1998). While usually done individually we have also had success doing them in pairs.
  
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  Researcher Biographies – This refers to a form of data collection in which one of our team follows the participant through their day to develop a day-in-the-life documentary.
  

By drawing on these sources of data we are able to triangulate our interpretations (Lincoln & Guba 1986). Our participatory design process also involved rapid visual prototyping and usability studies (Norman, 1988). Data analysis occurred in multiple stages, both as part of our ongoing data collection and at particular periods so that we could redirect subsequent data collection. A core challenge in our data analyses was not to let our pre-existing perspectives or social commitments become funnels through which all data were interpreted. As such, formative concepts/theories and designs were constantly tested against the empirical evidence.

Given our stance as design ethnographers, the evidence was gathered through both observations of existing interactions (wearing our hats as ethnographers) and also interactions that were created by us (wearing our hats as designers). In this way, and consistent with other accounts of ethnographers now perceived as “writing culture” (Marcus & Fischer 1986), our stories were both observed and created. However, moving beyond strict ethnographic accounts, our “culture” was not simply created by our pens: we actually had a hand in changing, and designing context. In this way, we had the luxury, the responsibility, and, possibly, the danger of actually making our interpretations real. As interpretations were built, we also debriefed with participants to determine if our characterizations resonated and accorded with those of our participants (Lather 1986; Lincoln & Guba 1986; Schatzman & Strauss 1973).
Core Tensions in Implementation

In doing the critical design ethnography work in the field, we have identified four struggles that we have confronted and have come to consider central to our work. These struggles have challenged us to reflect deeply on our empowerment agenda and how our work might have unplanned consequences. Parallel to the steps in the process of critical design ethnography, we have identified fundamental struggles associated with each of the four components of this process. These struggles challenge us by calling into question our respectful stance as responsible researchers and designers and oblige our acknowledgment of the sobering level of responsibility we assume when we engage in critical design ethnography. We also fully acknowledge that we have in no way “solved” these problems but rather have worked to develop on going strategies for mitigating their potentially negative effects.

The first step of critical design ethnography is developing a thick description. Inherent in this activity is the question of the extent to which we can truly understand another culture or cultural context. Given that this issue is one that has been taken up by numerous authors within anthropology (see for example Marcus & Fischer 1986), we respond to this issue by drawing on the methods established in anthropology circles such as participant observation which involves prolonged engagement and blurring the lines between the researcher and the researched. While uncommon in the field of design, we have come to consider this anthropology-inspired stance to be more respectful and more likely to yield the sophisticated, nuanced understandings required for developing appropriate designs than when we limit our contact to the target population to needs analysis or short usability studies.

The second step involves developing a series of social commitments that have local and global significance. This also brings us face to face with our own potential arrogance. How can we possibly determine the social commitments for anyone and why should we even assume that they want or need to so articulate these commitments? A challenge of design ethnography is determining what constitutes a legitimate warrant for action, especially when it is not solely identified by the peoples with whom one is collaborating. While there is nothing wrong with an agenda in theory it become problematic when an outsider intends to impose their agenda on another. Such a process can undermine local knowledge, people, and power, possibly contributing to mistrust, bad interventions, and unsustainable outcomes.

A core commitment underlying collaborative work is to establish a rapport, allowing both parties legitimate voice and a growing appreciation for the work that will involve time, investment, and intellectual contributions from all parties. However, in our case, this did not entail a total denial of any agenda; rather we worked to establish an agenda that was grounded in the contextual realities. Agendas, theories, and insights were not imposed prescriptively, but drawn upon opportunistically as appropriate in the context of the particular relationship through which they were being realized. In this way, our local experiences, awareness of the literature, and evolving commitments all interacted to support change.

The third step of critical design ethnography is reifying these understandings and commitments into a design. Is it possible to imbue a designed artifact with a social commitment? If this is possible, how can we be sure that the design appropriately reflects these intentions? While many researchers rightly have called into question the notion of reifying thought into a designed artifact, we hold that all design, art, and everything that we create is a reification of thought. In this way, we can consider that social commitments can be reified in an artifact. This artifact then can be thought of as having the potential or the affordance of having an interpreter make that potential manifest. Like a muscle at rest that contains potential energy, the designed artifact contains potential action. By way of participatory design and the continual reflective practice of co-evolution along with our users, we can address these concerns. Further, like a poem that is never finished but rather is eventually abandoned by the artist, our work of building contextual understandings, co-creating and advancing social commitments, design and co-evolving the design is never quite complete.

Consistent with others involved in participatory design work (Gaver 1996; Sanday 1998; Schuler & Namioka 1993; Wasson 2000), we became committed to the co-development of an agenda and design solution. We considered the children, the staff, parents, and ourselves as co-designers, mutually determining the purpose, value, and worth of the emergent collaboration and design work. Their agendas were as significant in determining the direction of our research and design as were those we initially brought to the project. Given this commitment, it is important that all parties have an opportunity to bring their respective expertise to bear on the relationship.

The fourth step in critical design ethnography is supporting scaling up and the reinterpretation of a design to multiple contexts. The question we face here is the appropriateness of a design for other contexts that are different from the initial site of the critical design ethnography. How can we know that our careful work in one context can be generalized to other contexts? The goal is not to “sterilize” designs or make them “teacher proof,” free from all confounding variables. Instead, the challenge is to develop flexibly adaptive designs that remain useful even when applied to new local contexts. Quest Atlantis is designed to be flexibly adaptive in that the learning activities, its interface and even its back-story can be modified by users to fit local contexts. This type of design work allows for and works to find multiple ways so that those applying the design can adapt it to fit their own local contexts.

More generally, we believe that contexts are never without agency; there are always teachers, administrators, students and community members creating context and, therefore, local adaptability must be allowed for in the design. Michael Fullan (1977) has suggested mutual adaptation as a term thinking about how an innovation both changes a local context and is reciprocally changed by context. Designs such as Quest Atlantis that foster community participation constantly adapt as new members participate, adding their thoughts and local struggles through community bulletin boards, email messages, chat dialogues, completed Quests, and through suggestions and contributions to our design team.
Final Thoughts

As designers with a change agenda, we carry out what we have referred to as critical design ethnography—an ethnographic process involving participatory design work with the agenda of transforming the local context while at the same time producing a design that can be taken up in multiple contexts. However, as critical design ethnographers, our agenda is always evolving and mutable. In fact, in our work, we have abandoned perspectives and goals that were at one point central to our agenda in favor of new goals and commitments that revealed themselves as more applicable, meaningful, and useful over time. It is this process of inquiring to understand, critiquing to make better, and designing to instantiate that change into an intervention that we refer to as critical design ethnography.

This fundamentally ethnographic work, involving engaged participation with a particular culture over an extended period of time, was different, richer, and more situated than our previous design work. We consider the relation between design ethnography and the field of anthropology to be a reciprocal one. On the one hand, our perspective as designers reflects such developments as action and critical ethnographic methods, which allow us to design with the insight and sensitivity not normally accessible to designers. On the other hand, design work bears considerable potential as a methodology for anthropologists seeking to extend case understandings to other contexts. In particular, we believe that this critical design ethnographic approach provides a model for negotiating difficult ethical decisions that educational anthropologists face when interacting with schools and social groups in desperate need of guidance and support. As educational anthropologists, we find it difficult to check our ethics and social values at the door, leaving it to other participants to shape the world. We believe that this process of making implicit values explicit, engaging in dialogue with participants about shared social commitments, and collaborating to design artifacts that reify social commitments into participant structures is one way that ethnographers might have an even greater impact through their work. To be sure, we recognize many concerns associated with this proposition.

Stepping back and reflecting on our work, we see this relationship as having three ongoing focal points that design ethnographers might consider. First is the issue of trust. Building trust is a necessary component in any relationship. Issues of trust are especially sensitive in the context of university-school or university-other relationship in which the university may be viewed as using others for their own agendas and community members may distrust university researchers’ motives and commitments of. This was evident in the comments of local staff critiquing “those university people” and the “town versus gown” divide that has been a problem at this Midwestern University. In this study, we view trust as evolving as a resultant of many factors, including adopting a participatory posture, developing multi-tiered relations, and having an evolving agenda as opposed to an imposed agenda.

The second focal point is the designed intervention, capturing the assumption that critical design ethnography involves building something with the goal of supporting change. Similar to critical ethnography, critical design ethnography involves a social commitment but with an emphasis on building a specific artifact or structure to support the change process. In our case, the intervention evolved over time as a dialectic between building a critique and designing online spaces. Further, the design itself is continually evolving both as an artifact as specific structures are locally adapted and also in terms of its core identity as members of new contexts add to its structure.

The third focal point involves sustainability and addresses the necessary commitment of the design ethnographer to support sustainable change. There is an expectation that whatever is implemented will not always be dependent on researcher participation unless that is a sustainable arrangement as in, for example, the Fifth Dimension project (Cole 1996). The goal is that the plan and the implementation are innovative but sustainable. All too often researchers finish their data collection and then shift to the next project, at which point the intervention without the support of the research team simply crumbles and results in mistrust and hurt feelings among the participants. We are still in the process of determining the best way to gradually scale back.

Our experience was that in this partnership we had to first put aside our own agenda so that we could build a collaborative agenda that still included our own commitments, but did so as part of a locally-grounded, locally-relevant, and locally-owned process. There is a tension in simultaneously having an agenda and at the same time listening, honoring, and learning from local contexts. This tension remained throughout our work with our view sometimes being front and center, other times fading more into the background, and others being challenged and modified or even abandoned depending on the particular interaction. We view this not as a contradiction but as a tension that is inherent to the process of carrying out critical design ethnography.

Beyond having a positive impact on the initial contexts in which we carried out the design ethnographies, this work also resulted in the development of an innovation, Quest Atlantis, which is now being used by thousands of children all over the world. A core question that remains is to what extent the design ethnography process used in our research is appropriate for other contexts. Negotiating a relationship in which one is an outsider and has the potential goal of intervening and ultimately transforming another’s environment is a delicate if not presumptuous process. Additionally, our work has involved extended periods of engagement longer than organizational change agents and designers have traditionally favored. It is our conviction, however, that this type of design work, fueled by an ethnographic foundation, has the potential to positively impact the initial sites of innovation and produce a design that can have value more globally.

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