hello. and a bit about ethnography.

What is ethnography?

Although I happen to be in a master's course in that very realm, I am still a bit unsure of what it all means. Back to this in a minute though.

A week ago, we were privileged enough to spend lunch with Richard Harper, a user researcher at Microsoft. Many things are worth noting.

1. I was expecting somebody who was convinced that technology is the best thing since peanut butter, and was completely wrong. He gets it. Mr. Harper understands that most humans do not care about the speed of the bluetooth connection (or what the hell bluetooth actually is) of their phone—they just want to be able to share things with their friends and family. Or in his words, us humans "just want to play". Word.

2. He enjoyed (even though he didn't come out and say it) the lame mustache I had grown during vacation.

3. He once was an ethnographer for Arthur Anderson, the now-defunct accounting firm, and lived to tell about it.

Back to the definition. I often think of ethnography as "understanding people", which I still think to be true, but a bit limited in scope. Now I am under the impression that ethnography is all about understanding life, which consequently involves humans.

Yesterday we spent the day in Edinburgh on an ethnography assignment to find "traces of human activity", such as people leaving behind rubbish or notes, among other examples. While wandering around the city, I was obsessed with the actual traces: the coffee cups, people using walls as seats, etc. It only occurred to me as I was inhaling some panini at a local cafe that I was missing the point. Instead of understanding the traces, I should try to understand the life of Edinburghers. This realization allowed me to see the bigger picture for the rest of the day, and I believe it enhanced the results.

So what does this all mean? I'm not really sure. Perhaps that focusing too much on a single activity, even though it is being performed by a human, is a cheap excuse for ethnography. Maybe it means that walking around like outsiders with cameras and notebooks may look like ethnography, but can easily just be misguided tourism. It is like looking at one corner of the fishbowl without realizing that there is an entire tank we are forgetting about.

Of course all of this could be wrong, although it sure doesn't feel like it.

It seems that a problem with observation is that it is just a single snapshot of somebody's existence. It would be easy for Richard Harper to watch a human utilizing the bluetooth capability of a gizmo and saying "humans like bluetooth-y bells and whistles", instead of realizing that the human is using bluetooth to capture a quote from Anchorman to send to his or her friends.

This appears to be a simple concept when reading it in blog form. But when in the field, it can be very tough to keep this perspective.

By the way, happy year of the ox.