Design implications

It is incredibly refreshing to find a paper that terminates all your doubts: now you not only can justify yourself, you can say that there is someone else, out there, in the academic authority Olympus, who agrees with you.

I'm talking about the never-ending discussion about design implications for ethnographic research: to be or not to be?

One of the most mind-tearing, heart-squeezing, leg-shaking questions one can ask himself during the fieldwork is "what if I don't find any design implications??". Every time this evil question came to my mind during the days (or nights) at The Newspaper, my stomach felt funny.

And the reason for that is that you don't know until it is over. And, even when it is, it might be that you simply don't have anything specific to tell anyone. Yes, the main role of ethnographic work for CSCW research is to inform systems design, but trying to squeeze a list of things that need to be done in the end of a report might to asking to much from the researcher.

It might be that you just have an insight, and a solution for a problem is right in front of your nose: clear, objective ways of improving people's work, accompanied by a thorough analysis of why this or that innovation might work in this specific culture you just spent 3 months examining is obviously a good thing.

However, if a study describes a specific work setting in detail, giving a sound, thorough account of how those people do what they do every day explaining what works what doesn't work and why it doesn't can be already a good contribution to a corpus of study.

Lydia Plowman, Yvonne Rogers and Magnus Ramage agree with me. According to them:

"...workplace studies carried out primarily to understand a particular working practice are making a valuable contribution to the body of CSCW knowledge in their own right As pointed out in the section on basic research such studies can inform CSCW design through raising awareness of important conceptual issues and questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about work activities and how they should be supported. In essence, 'the main virtue of ethnography is its ability to make visible the 'real world' sociality of a setting' (Hughes et ai, 1994).

They also say that:

1. researchers should not feel obliged to force design implications from their material;
2. researchers and designers should engage more in a continuous dialogue to help bridge the gap and misunderstandings between 'techno-talk' and 'ethno-talk';
3. workplace studies for 'their own sake' have played an important role in shaping CSCW and should continue to be supported unfettered to provide further insight into the social, the cognitive and the technical aspects of work.

I couldn't agree more. When I first heard this argument -- from my supervisor's mouth, before starting my fieldwork -- I had the impression that this was somehow connected to lazyness. Yes, I did my friends, I thought that. For me it seemed quite reasonable that the researcher should also come up with the design solution for any problems they find in the field.

And that is the mindset behind much of the research we see today: researchers go to the field so obsessed with finding "what's wrong" that it is difficult to believe that the bulk of qualitative research today isn't biased.

Anyway, this is enough discussion. I made my point, I guess. :)