What is design ethnography?

I get asked this question a lot. I explain what design ethnography is like this...

Design ethnography is a form of design research. Design research is investigative research that is conducted for the purpose of influencing product, process and program design outcomes. It can be qualitative or quantitative, I specialize in qualitative research.

My goals as a design researcher are to 1) discover design innovation opportunities and 2) improve the design of existing products and on-line applications by bringing awareness of user activities and values into design processes.

Design ethnography is form of design research that is heavily influenced by educational and cultural anthropology. Ethnographers are social scientists. It's our job to understand people, social interaction and the tools that are used to communicate and create such as language, objects of art and computer.

You are probably familiar with the work of cultural anthropologists who travel to remote areas of the world to study indigenous people. You may be aware from the popular press that this type of work is now being done in business contexts and practiced by social scientists and designers trained in other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and linguistics. Ethnography is being used to inform industrial design and computer system design as well as business, marketing and advertizing strategies.

Ethnographers gain access to cultural groups and at first have an outsider perspective on what they witness and particpate in. Over time they learn to understand interactions and creative practices from the perspective of cultural insiders. This becomes the raw material from which to create ethnographies. These consist of "thick description" and media rich documentation as well as reflections, analyses and recommended interventions. Ethnographers observe in natural environments as opposed to laboratories. It is our job to document what we observe, feel and deduce and communicate new knowledge to our audiences. Shocking challenges to common world views facilitate discovery and new ways of thinking.

I recommend design ethnography when design teams don't know their target users. I also recommend it when the objective is to identify innovation opportunity. The pay-off is often more than anyone imagined and is one of the reasons why ethnographers have moved from usability groups where the focus is very narrow to strategy groups tasked to set future goals and develop project teams.