Peter Tolmie

Ethnography considered harmful

We review the current status of ethnography in systems design. We focus particularly on new approaches to and understandings of ethnography that have emerged as the computer has moved out of the workplace. These seek to implement a different order of ethnographic study to that which has largely been employed in design to date. In doing so they reconfigure the relationship ethnography has to systems design, replacing detailed empirical studies of situated action with studies that provide cultural interpretations of action and critiques of the design process itself. We hold these new approaches to and understandings of ethnography in design up to scrutiny, with the purpose of enabling designers to appreciate the differences between new and existing approaches to ethnography in systems design and the practical implications this might have for design.

Doing design ethnography

Precis.- Ethnography and Systems Design.- Our Kind of Sociology.- Finding the Animal in the Foliage.- Dispensing with Method.- Doing Fieldwork.- Analysing the Ethnographic Record.- Informing Design.- Some Common Misunderstandings, Objections and Complaints.- Design Ethnography in a Nutshell.

The ins and outs of home networking: The case for useful and usable domestic networking

Householders are increasingly adopting home networking as a solution to the demands created by the presence of multiple computers, devices, and the desire to access the Internet. However, current network solutions are derived from the world of work (and initially the military) and provide poor support for the needs of the home. We present the key findings to emerge from empirical studies of home networks in the UK and US. The studies reveal two key kinds of work that effective home networking relies upon: one, the technical work of setting up and maintaining the home network, and the other, the collaborative and socially organized work of the home which the network is embedded in and supports. The two are thoroughly intertwined and rely upon one another for their realization, yet neither is adequately supported by current networking technologies and applications. Explication of the “work to make the home network work” opens up the design space for the continued integration of the home network in domestic life and elaboration of future support. Key issues for development include the development of networking facilities that do not require advanced networking knowledge, that are flexible and support the local social order of the home and the evolution of its routines, and which ultimately make the home network visible and accountable to household members.

Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads

As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours, many of which remain unverified long after their point of release. Little is known, however, about the dynamics of the life cycle of a social media rumour. In this paper we present a methodology that has enabled us to collect, identify and annotate a dataset of 330 rumour threads (4,842 tweets) associated with 9 newsworthy events. We analyse this dataset to understand how users spread, support, or deny rumours that are later proven true or false, by distinguishing two levels of status in a rumour life cycle i.e., before and after its veracity status is resolved. The identification of rumours associated with each event, as well as the tweet that resolved each rumour as true or false, was performed by journalist members of the research team who tracked the events in real time. Our study shows that rumours that are ultimately proven true tend to be resolved faster than those that turn out to be false. Whilst one can readily see users denying rumours once they have been debunked, users appear to be less capable of distinguishing true from false rumours when their veracity remains in question. In fact, we show that the prevalent tendency for users is to support every unverified rumour. We also analyse the role of different types of users, finding that highly reputable users such as news organisations endeavour to post well-grounded statements, which appear to be certain and accompanied by evidence. Nevertheless, these often prove to be unverified pieces of information that give rise to false rumours. Our study reinforces the need for developing robust machine learning techniques that can provide assistance in real time for assessing the veracity of rumours. The findings of our study provide useful insights for achieving this aim.

Making the home network at home: Digital housekeeping

This paper exploits ethnographic findings to build on and elaborate Grinter et al’s 2005 study of “the work to make the home network work”. We focus particularly on the work involved in setting up and maintaining home networks, which we characterize as ‘digital housekeeping’. Our studies reveal that it is through digital housekeeping that the home network is ‘made at home’ or made into an unremarkable and routine feature of domestic life. The orderly ways in which digital housekeeping ‘gets done’ elaborate a distinct ‘social machinery’ that highlights some important implications for the continued development of network technologies for the home. These include a requirement that designers take existing infrastructure into account and pay considerable attention to how future technologies may be incorporated into existing routines. The preoccupation of household members with making the home network transparent and accountable so that it is available to practical reasoning suggests designers should also consider the development of dedicated management interfaces to support digital housekeeping.

Digital plumbing: the mundane work of deploying UbiComp in the home

Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiser’s grand vision of ‘invisible’ computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic, however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper, we wish to complement the community’s growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on ‘digital plumbing’—i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies with respect to existing technological arrangements in the home and to develop methods and tools that support the digital plumber in planning and preparing for change, in managing the contingencies that inevitably occur in realizing change, and in coordinating digital plumbing and maintaining awareness of change.

The practical indispensability of articulation work to immediate and remote help-giving

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in articulation work and the methodical ways in which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities. We provide examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving to explicate what we mean by articulation work and to tease out common and characteristic methods involved in help-seeking and the giving of expert advice. We then outline how emerging technologies might best be used to support articulation work in the design and development of systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

“How Many Bloody Examples Do You Want?” Fieldwork and Generalisation

The title of this paper comes from comments made by an ‘angry’ ethnographer during a debriefing session. It reflects his frustration with a certain analytic mentality that would have him justify his observations in terms of the number of times he had witnessed certain occurrences in the field. Concomitant to this was a concern with the amount of time he had spent in the field and the implication that the duration of fieldwork somehow justified the things that he had seen; the implication being that the more time he spent immersed in the study setting the more valid his findings and, conversely, the less time, the less valid they were. For his interlocutors, these issues speak to the grounds upon which we might draw general insights and lessons from ethnographic research regarding the social or collaborative organisation of human activities. However, the strong implication of the angry ethnographer’s response is that they are of no importance. This paper seeks to unpack his position and explicate what generalisation turns upon from the ethnographer’s perspective. The idea that human activities contain their own means of generalisation that cannot be reduced to extraneous criteria (numbers of observations, duration of fieldwork, sample size, etc.) is key to the exposition.

Homework: putting interaction into the infrastructure

This paper presents a user driven redesign of the domestic network infrastructure that draws upon a series of ethnographic studies of home networks. We present an infrastructure based around a purpose built access point that has modified the handling of protocols and services to reflect the interactive needs of the home. The developed infrastructure offers a novel measurement framework that allows a broad range of infrastructure information to be easily captured and made available to interactive applications. This is complemented by a diverse set of novel interactive control mechanisms and interfaces for the underlying infrastructure. We also briefly reflect on the technical and user issues arising from deployments.

‘Memories are made of this’: explicating organisational knowledge and memory

It is a commonplace that in the ‘Information Age’, knowledge is the most important factor in the long-term success of an organisation. Such an emphasis is increasingly important as businesses confront a series of intransigent organisational problems connected with the retention and provision of organisational histories, knowledge and skills. ‘Organisational memory’ and its sister concept, ‘knowledge management’, are common glosses for the analysis and treatment of these problems. We analyse some of the conceptual and empirical issues that must precede attempts to provide support for ‘memory’ and ‘knowledge’ in the wider organisational context.