Using ethnography in contextural design

Simonsen, Jesper; Kensing, Finn

doi:10.1145/256175.256190

Cited by 92 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Office workers are hardly aware of their own routines [Simonsen & Kensing, 1997], so, as we could test for ourselves, their reconstruction during interview are not reliable sources for understanding what they actually do. And asking them to record their own activity themselves, on the fly, is not realistic: at fine grain level, describing an action may be as long as performing it.…”

Section: Observation Problemsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Observing Cognitive Work in Offices

Lahlou¹

1999

Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organizations, and Architecture

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Original citation: Lahlou, Saadi (1999) Observing cognitive work in officesSaadi Lahlou EDF R&D Division 1, Ave du Gal. de Gaulle. 92141 Clamart Cedex FRANCE Email: saadi.lahlou@edf.fr Abstract.The information revolution has a deep impact on office work. To create better environments for cognitive workers, we designed two observation tools recording office activity. The Subcam (subjective camera) is a miniature, wearable, wide angle video camera, clipped on a pair of glasses ; it records individual activity from a subjective point of view, wherever the user goes. The Offsat (office satellite) takes a picture every minute from the ceiling, showing long term evolution in the spatial distribution of information artifacts (piles, etc.), and measuring the distribution of gross activity (meetings, stand alone computing, etc.). We currently use these tool in a series of new furniture and information artifact design experiments.

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Section: Observation Problemsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Observing Cognitive Work in Offices

Lahlou¹

1999

Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organizations, and Architecture

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“…Initially, it may seem that due to the need to uncover qualitative findings such as the needs and desires of the YES students as well as the obstacles blocking those needs and desires, we would use Human-centered Design (HCD) [6][7][8] . However, in this specific case, the author is already and consistently, deeply immersed in the context and lives of the students, school, and parents, so their needs are much more clearly known by the author than an outsider who must use temporary contextual immersion as an ethnographic research tool [9][10][11][12] . This is not to say that qualitative research is useless.…”

Section: Mᴇᴛʜᴏᴅᴏʟᴏɢʏmentioning

confidence: 99%

YES International Summer Service Program Design for High School Students

Udoewa¹

2017

IJSLE

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-YES Prep PublicSchools is a group of public charter schools focused on serving students from low-income communities across Houston, Texas. One requirement of all YES students is summer school between grades 5 through 10 and two mandatory summer internships between grades 10 and 12. Due to financial concerns many students who desire to do an international internship cannot afford any available programs offering such internships. In 2005, we introduced a new, internal, international summer service program for YES high school students to satisfy our summer internship requirement. This paper focuses on the process and results of designing, implementing, and modifying the program using the Lean Startup methodology through its first few years before it won a national award for its character-building work.

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“…There have also been a number of studies in the IS field (Harper 2000;Myers et al 1997;Orlikowski 1991;Suchman 1995). These studies were aimed at developing a thorough understanding of current work practices as a basis for the design of IS support (Simonsen et al 1997). While traditional software engineering methods often fail to consider crucial aspects of the users' environment, such as the social context of work and organisation, ethnographic research explicitly focuses on the social settings in which the intended system should be used (Hughes et al 1994;Myers 1999).…”

Section: Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such studies have been used for a variety of purposes, e.g., to perform complete requirements analyses of engineering processes, (Ball et al 2000;Weng et al 2006), to provide additional information to traditional requirements engineering methods, (Bentley et al 1992;Simonsen et al 1997;Viller et al 2000), to investigate the impact or the quality of existing software, (Robinson et al 2007), or to study real-world phenomena for theory-building, (Maginn 2007;Millen 2000;Tuula et al 2006).…”

Section: Rapid and Collaborative Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative ethnography for information systems research Studying knowledge work practices and designing supportive information systems

Maier

Thalmann

2012

AJIS

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Understanding knowledge work and supporting it with information systems (ISs) are challenging tasks. Although there have been numerous studies on knowledge work in varying contexts, many of them are not detailed enough or outdated, particularly with respect to IS support. Knowledge work underwent dramatic changes over recent years, and empirical research studies into how knowledge work is currently performed are scarce. Ethnography would appear to be the most suitable qualitative research method for studying knowledge work, were it not too time-consuming, costly and unfocused for the fast-changing IS domain. Moreover, if we want to ensure the take-up of results from qualitative studies, these need to be transformed into artefacts for the design and engineering of IS requirements. This paper proposes a procedure for the study of knowledge work practices that was adapted from collaborative ethnography, and can be used to inform requirements gathering for, and the design of, IS. The procedure is illustrated with an example of a collaborative ethnographic study which involved seven organisations in four European countries who took part in a large-scale international IS research and development project. The paper also critically discusses the procedure's implementation and its limitations.

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Using ethnography in contextural design

Cited by 92 publications

References 3 publications

Observing Cognitive Work in Offices

Observing Cognitive Work in Offices

YES International Summer Service Program Design for High School Students

Collaborative ethnography for information systems research Studying knowledge work practices and designing supportive information systems

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