Lou and Cee Cee prepare for fieldwork in the future: a world where robots conduct ethnography
Note from the Editor, Tricia Wang: Kicking off our Co-designing with machines edition is Alicia Dudek (@aliciadudek), Innovation Insight Lead & Design Ethnographer at Deloitte Digital Australia. Using design thinking, ethnography, and other deep contextual customer research methods, she designs, conducts, and trains others in the world of customer empathy. Her contribution to this edition is the first science fiction to explore robots conducting ethnographic work. She uses a fictional story with Cee Cee, the robo-ethnographer, to examine what aspects of fieldwork can be conducted by a robot. I first met Alicia Dudek at an EPIC conference in London, where I became a fan of her work and promptly interviewed her for our edition that featured the best from EPIC. Read the interview, Play nice – design ethnographer meets management consultant, and find more of her writings on ethnography at her site.
Increasingly we are seeing more conversations about ‘what does it look like when the robots take your job.’ Once upon a time we believed this was some remote future where we’d finally invented the technology that could replace our bio-body’s ingenious functions. Now we are coming into a time where our technology has grown so advanced that the replacement of ourselves with robots is not only imagined, but plausible and even possible. An example of this shift is the imagining of white collar jobs ‘going robo’ that was recently covered by Quartz.
Writing this piece I wanted to have a little fun imagining a wonderful world where we can work hand in hand with robot peers. It is exciting to imagine the day when artificial intelligence is on par with that of our human research team members. Ethnographic technology is sometimes slow to progress due to the art and science nature of our work, but if we had the magic wand to unite all the drones, phones, data smarts, and humanly arts, we might have robo-colleagues as a part of our team one day soon. Friendly humans and friendly robots conducting ethnography together are a powerful combination. Also thank you to Elizabeth Dubois for writing this piece about trace interviews, which has some cool ideas on how we might conduct interviews.
– Alicia Dudek
Lou muses over her tea as she prepares for fieldwork with Cee Cee.
Lou mused over the steam rising from her cup of tea. She gathered her thoughts around what she’d be looking for in the field next week. She and her team were going to shadow young families and understand how they managed their finances. Field work was always one of the most exciting and exhausting parts of the data collection in her ethnography projects. What would be the right focus area for a trip into this family’s everyday life? She knew she’d have to cover the basics of bank accounts, credit cards, laptop / tablet / phone usage, calendar keeping, overall scheduling, family diaries, but what else might be valuable? What else could help to point the team in the direction of the golden nuggets of insight? All these years of traipsing in and out of the field and analysing scores of transcripts, videos, audios had left her always questioning, what’s next? What were the mental parameters that led her to the deep and meaningful insights from field observations? What was that ineffable thing that clients kept hiring her for again and again? How does an ethnographer see differently to find the golden nuggets?
Lou was jostled out of this reverie as Cee Cee energetically buzzed into the office and landed on Louise’s desk with a plop. “Louise I’m here for my briefing for the field work to be conducted.” Lou looked up from her imagined fieldwork and focused on Cee Cee’s entry into her office. In the past Lou had had dozens of assistants, grad students, and junior ethnographers to help with her work. None of them was quite like Cee Cee, who was rather innovative and definitely pushed Lou’s ways of working to new places. “Alright Cee Cee let’s get going on the briefing and I’ll tell you what we’re looking for and how to behave when you get out there.” Lou readjusted her posture and swung around to meet Cee Cee head on and get into the briefing.Read More… Lou and Cee Cee prepare for fieldwork in the future: a world where robots conduct ethnography
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