Ethnography Matters

Mizuko ‘Mimi’ Ito

Editor’s Note: We finish off this month’s theme on ethnography in education with an interview with Mizuko ‘Mimi’ Ito (@mizuko). Mimi has some impressive experience with the topics covered this month: she is the Research Director at the Digital Media and Learning Hub, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning, and a Professor in Anthropology and Informatics at UC Irvine (after getting two PhDs from Stanford). And she is as kind and generous as she is brilliant.

In this interview, Mimi provides insights on bridging disciplines – from ethnography to economics – and institutions – from academia to industry. She also discusses the challenges and opportunities in forging new research agendas and shaping a field, something with which she has a lot of personal experience. We are thrilled to share Mimi’s insights with you to round out this month’s theme on ethnography in education. To learn more about Mimi, check out her many books and reports, summarized at the end of the interview.

Morgan: You’ve worked on a lot of compelling projects using ethnographic methods. What do you see as the strengths of ethnography?

Mimi: I think, for me, I was always in an unusual bucket as an ethnographer because I’ve always done research ‘at home’ and I haven’t taken on the frame of culture in quite the same was as ethnographers do, but I’ve adopted and adapted the perspectives and political commitments and methods of ethnography, and for that has worked very well in studying youth media. My approach has been to study youth culture and media as a space of cultural difference within a particular society. These technologies are new and children and youth occupy a somewhat segregated culture. Feminist ethnographies look at social stratification, and my approach shares affinities with those.

When I started out, there wasn’t a lot of work in anthropology looking at children and youth cultures, and I found that the perspectives of ethnography was really useful for looking at these subaltern and disempowered groups. A lot of my perspectives came from my training in anthropology about how to give voice to the unique ingenuity and perspectives of those who are disempowered. The role of youth in most societies as a relatively oppressed and marginalized population has been relatively under-studied in anthropology. The field has done a great job of studying regional inequities, and gender, race, and class, but has been remarkably silent about the everyday oppression that most societies have based on age.Read More… On the Importance of Ethnography in Education: an interview with Mizuko ‘Mimi’ Ito

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Editor’s Note: This post for May’s Special Edition on ‘Talking to Companies about ethnography’ comes from Steve Portigal who has a new book out this month titled Interviewing Users. As someone who’s been in the trenches for decades now running his own successful consultancy, Steve has done a great deal of both ‘interviewing users’ and ‘talking to companies about ethnography.’ Below we take the opportunity to interview him! We at Ethnography Matters are also big fans of the ‘War Stories‘ series on his blog where interviewers report on the unexpected things that happen to them in the field.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. Over the course of his career, he has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. He blogs at portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

This interview is available en Español – Habitantes Experiencia Diseño Innovación

Image courtesy of Rosenfeld Media

Ethnography Matters: First all Steve, congrats! We are so excited to have a copy of your book. Before diving into the specific questions, we want to know what motivated you to write this book?

Steve Portigal: Thanks! I’ve wanted to write a book from the time I was a little kid. I didn’t imagine it would be non-fiction, though! A lot of folks in the user experience and design worlds were feeling the need for a good book about this and my name came up as the author they’d want to see something from. I had been talking with Rosenfeld Media for a while about writing something, but it seemed like a daunting commitment. But when your peers are asking for it, it’s pretty compelling!

EM: So which part of the book was the most fun to write? Which part was the hardest?

SP: There were creative and intellectual challenges and rewards all the way along. A lot of the writing process was taking topics I had been speaking about for years and crafting the kind of text that is appropriate for a practitioner book. It was fun to revisit familiar points and find a better way to convey them. And then once in a while I’d hit on something that I maybe would typically gloss over in a presentation and realize I’d better dig a little deeper into myself and find away to explain something. The details of some of those moments are lost to memory, but the part of the process where I was discovering something by articulating it was pretty wonderful.

Read More… Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal

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I “formally” discovered ethnography during my undergraduate degree in Cognitive Sciences when studying in France. Aside from classes in experimental psychology, we had courses in linguistics and cultural anthropology which is where I ran across this field and its approach. I remember that the lectures were fascinating, and the assignments were even more intriguing. We had to run interviews and observe curious topics such as how car-makers named auto-parts and their color, or how people make sense of the spatial environment. What caught me as interesting at the time was the approach, as it was totally different than the controlled experiments we had to run in Cognitive Psychology. Now that I think about it, the gap between these research endeavors is also huge in an epistemological sense, and I’m not sure that people in our program got that from the outset, but it was a marvelous opportunity to understand ethnography.

What I enjoyed was that it framed the way I was curious about the world, artifacts, people, and what they were doing. It basically corresponded to a more rigorous approach compared to something I use to do as a kid with my brother: going anywhere, sitting on a bench and looking at people, trying to make sense of what they were doing… an activity we used to called very naively “street physiognomy” (which, in retrospect, wasn’t physiognomy at all since we were focused on people’s activities).
Read More… We’re growing! Nicolas Nova Joins Ethnography Matters as a Contributor

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