Ethnography Matters

Brittany Fiore-Silfvast (@brittafiore) is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Washington and she holds an MA in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the relationship of technology and emerging cultural and organizational forms. Her work cited in this article was supported in part by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and an Intel grant.

Editor’s note: One of the disciplines big data is most strongly influencing is medicine, and here Brittany Fiore-Silfvast (@brittafiore) applies her expertise to examine the interplay between health and technology to understand the implications of today’s unprecedented levels of patient data collection and analysis (although, notably, seldom including access to the data by those very patients who produced it).

Brittany hits upon a key issue with her post: seeing “big data” as a means of eliminating uncertainty through statistical analysis. While the elimination of uncertainty through statistical analysis is nothing new, the difference today is the scale at which collection and analysis of such data is unfolding and the diversity of the fields in which it is occurring.

Read on to discover the nature of conflict between the main personal genetics testing company 23andme, the importance of and difference between big data, small data, thick data, and DaM data, and the role that “Blue Suede Shoes” play in all of this.

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid laughingsquid.com

Across the field of health and wellness there is a lot of talk about data, from consumer self-tracking and Quantified Self data, to data-driven, personalized health care, to data-intensive, crowd sourced, scientific discovery. But what are these different stakeholders talking about when they talk about data and are they talking about the same thing?

At EPIC, in the “Big Data/Ethnography or Big Data Ethnography” session, I presented on this topic drawing from our ethnography of the impact of consumer big and small data on institutions of healthcare. In this post I use the recent controversy between the FDA and personal genetics testing company, 23andme, to exemplify many of the concepts my co-author, Dr. Gina Neff, and I develop in our EPIC paper “What we talk about when we talk data: Valences and the social performance of multiple metrics in digital health”, rather than simply re-present them.  I also demonstrate how ethnography can be leveraged in the context of so-called “big data” or data intensive transformations in science and practice.Read More… Ethnography in Communities of Big Data: Contested expectations for data in the 23andme and FDA Controversy

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Editor’s note: A few weeks ago, we saw our twitter stream light up with John Payne’s work on ethnography of Occupy. We quickly reached out to John and asked him to guest post on Ethnography Matters. John had facilitated a 2 and half day course of ethnographic fieldwork on Occupy for designers and blogged a series of 3 very thoughtful posts about the experience.

What struck us about John’s work was that he was teaching ethnography to non-ethnographers and emphasizing the importance of it to his work as a designer. We wish all designers would say this! Perhaps this is one of the reason why John’s company that he co-founded, Moment, is so successful. They have created mobile applications from enterprise software to consumer apps for clients large and small.

We are lucky to have John respost the 3-part series with a new introduction on Ethnography Matters!  Follow John Payne on twitter. And do check out Moment’s great blog, we’re following them! – Tricia

A bit more about John: 

As a Principal at Moment, John brings a passion for research and design methodologies to his teams, helping teams gain the empathy necessary to create great products for clients. In addition, John has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in design methodology at Parsons and NYU and is Co-chair of EPIC 2012, The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. Educated at Auburn University and Institute of Design at IIT (the New Bauhaus), John has, over the course of his 20+ year career, focused on designing groundbreaking physical and digital products that transform users’ relationships with their devices.

Check out past guest bloggers. Ethnography Matters is always lining up guest contributors, we would love to feature your work! Send us an email!

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Successful adoption of products (physical or digital) relies heavily on an individual’s ability to judge appropriateness, usefulness and ease-of-use.  As a practicing designer, I have long employed an ethnographic approach to better understand the people and organizations my firm designs for, to give them products that not only address their needs, but that also actually make sense in their everyday lives.

As any reader of this blog knows, ethnography has proven invaluable at getting beyond “user needs,” to reveal the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that influence decisions about adoption and ongoing use. But the influence of cultural factors on product design are sorely lacking from the discussion of user experience.

To address that challenge, last fall I taught a workshop on ethnography as applied to user experience design for the New York chapter of the IxDA. We took as our research site Liberty Square, a.k.a Zucotti Park, ground zero to the Occupy Wall Street movement and spent a cold winter afternoon there, visiting, observing, and engaging with the occupiers in their two month old encampment. Our goal, to determine what, if any, design interventions would improve their ability to communicate and coordinate their protest.

The post that follows was originally a three-part discussion presenting ethnography to an audience of designers and describing what we learned from our afternoon there, the ideas that emerged from our analysis, and the value that ethnography brings to user experience work.

This series originally appeared on Moment’s blog as a series titled “Ethnography for User Experience.”

Part One

I was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience. Ethnography, as both a term and a discipline, is often misunderstood so I was happy to have the opportunity to give my perspective on it and on what it can contribute to User Experience Design. Ethnography was formalized as a research approach in the social sciences, specifically within the discipline of anthropology, where it is commonly employed to describe human societies and cultures. In that setting, ethnography refers to a suite of qualitative research methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. as well as the interpretive output of that research.

Read More… Teaching Ethnography For User Experience: A Workshop On Occupy Wall Street

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