Erik Styhr Petersen

Epistemology in ethnography: assessing the quality of knowledge in human factors research

Quality measures are often used to judge research. This paper looks at what measures have been used in the human factors community to evaluate qualitative research and suggests some alternatives. Using ethnography as a test case, the paper raises the question of whether it is appropriate to use measures derived from quantitative and experimental research to judge the quality of qualitative studies, regardless of the subject and problem domain.

Ethnography re-engineered: the two tribes problem

Does ethnography have anything to offer to the engineering community or the computer development community? Theoretically, yes, it does. Ethnography can provide the skills and tools that will help us understand user needs and preferences, which can then be embedded into software and hardware. Still, it is difficult to find any discussion of commercial hardware or software products in which ethnography demonstratively played a decisive part, which has led some to argue that ethnography, as it is currently practiced in the computer development community, would never have any practical impact. Bader and Nyce [Bader, G. and Nyce, J.M., 1998. When only the self is real: theory and practice in the development community. Journal of Computer Documentation, 22 (1), 5–10] raised this issue a decade ago, and argued that ethnographic knowledge appeared to be largely unintelligible and inoperable to the computer development community. To date, this debate has not been taken much further, and the results of ethnographic research continue to be published in the HCI/Human Factors literature. The issues Bader and Nyce raised a decade ago have however not gone away: to what extent can ethnography make a practical contribution to the computer development community? This article picks up this discussion, re-examines the original arguments and commentary, adds a Koenian view of engineering epistemology to the analysis, and concludes that we appear to require a much improved understanding of engineering epistemology, to support interdisciplinary communication. Building on this foundation, what may furthermore be necessary is to perform an ethnographic operation twice, not just once: essentially, it is argued, it is necessary to build a kind of ethnography that takes the ‘interpretation’ of research findings to one’s clients as seriously as it does the interpretation of what goes on in a particular, ‘targeted’ workplace for end-users. By providing this kind of ‘double’ translation and interpretation, it would be possible to ‘deliver’ ethnographic findings to the engineering communities in a form they find intelligible, simply by doing what ethnography does best: the discovery and interpretation of what is taken to be self-evident and logical.

Interacting with Classic Design Engineering

Triggered by our occasionally tense field experiences relating to the implementation and institutionalization of usability in design engineering organizations that are characterized by traditional engineering education and thinking, we have earlier suspected that the activities associated with human-centered design were orthogonal to the design engineering practices otherwise in place. While noting that other human factors professionals have had comparable challenges relating to multidisciplinary design, we have, however, reached a point where we rather are suggesting that the ontological, epistemological and methodological grounding of classic design engineering, under some circumstances, could be the direct cause for friction between that discipline and that of human factors. In a way taking our own medicine, we have thus arrived at a place where we are realizing the need for an ethnographical exploration and improved understanding of classic design engineering fundamentals, appreciating that a more successful and fruitful interaction and cooperation with that essential discipline very well could spring from a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the mindset of the classic design engineer. The main part of the present paper pivots around developing such an insight, hoping to contribute to the effective, efficient and satisfactory outcome of multidisciplinary cooperation for those who find themselves being tasked with human-centric work in traditional engineering organizations.

Human-centred design knowledge into maritime engineering education; theoretical framework

Abstract Maritime designers engaged in the ship design process seem to be fairly unaware about human factors (HF), human-centred design (HCD) and the operational issues that ships’ crew are facing during their sea time. This is likely due to the combined effect of poor maritime HF education in maritime design engineering courses and poor ‘post-design’ contact with those who work onboard the ships. In order to address this issue, recent research studies suggest focusing on transferring HF/HCD knowledge to maritime design engineering students’ education in a more targeted, engineering-oriented fashion. This paper presents a theoretical framework and its proposed application to facilitate the maritime design engineering undergraduates to learn HF/HCD concepts and apply them during design process. The proposed framework is developed by connecting Problem-Based Learning and Peer-Led Team Learning student-centred pedagogies with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development theory that is central to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. The final-year design project unit of the Bachelor of engineering degree at Australian Maritime College is chosen to operationalise the proposed framework through a Participatory Action Research methodological framework, which is considered appropriate to study the effectiveness of a teaching intervention.