5 – Field: How to Follow Design Through Society

Publisher Summary Many design researchers have borrowed their methods from interpretive social science rather than experimental research. If there is one keyword to describe the field approach to design, it must be “context.” Researchers are interested in how people and communities understand things around designs, make sense of them, talk about them, and live with them. The lab decontextualizes; the field contextualizes. Further, design ethnography differs from corporate ethnography, an heir of studies in organizational culture, which focused on issues like management and how symbols integrate organizations. Design ethnography works with product design and is a way to handle cultural risks in industry. Sometimes it is a separate front-end activity, and sometimes it is closely integrated into product development. Design ethnographers typically work in teams and use prototypes during fieldwork to create dialog with the people in the study. They communicate through formats accessible to engineers, and their fieldwork is measured in days or weeks, not months. For them, first-hand experience of context is typically more important than fact finding, or even careful theoretically informed interpretation.