e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

A Primer on Ethnography from Designers

so the association formerly known as the American Institute of Graphic Arts - aka AIGA - published "An Ethnography Primer." Its a short read - about 30 pages - but it does give a good overview of how designers and ethnographers could work well together in a design process. My red flag goes up a bit since I've seen 'ethnography' and its associated set of practices and methodologies, given short shrift in the design world. make no mistake it is a hot buzz word right now but it also seems that everyone who ever did market research now thinks that they are ethnographers. To be fair - when this primer lays out step-by-step how a designer and an ethnographer could work together, it does define clear roles for each. My fear though is that some will read this primer and rather than concludng that they should go find someone who has actually done the requisite academic piece and fieldwork - they'll simply conclude that those sound like things that they can do..and by golly, they never knew they were ethnographers. Then we get shallow insights, superficial readings and badly designed programs and products. This primer is a nice start but don't confuse it for sufficient reading.

More Anthropology Items...

So the post from last week about how business is 're-discovering' anthropology sent me down a whole other rabbit hole, which while interesting, has put some retrograde motion of my "reduce the tabs" movement. I did want to pass these items along however.

First - check out kiwanja.net. This is one of Ken Banks' efforts (he wrote the article I cited). The site/project's efforts are described as follows -  "Since 2003, kiwanja.net has been helping local, national and   international non-profit organisations make better use of information and   communications technology in their work.I think the mobile focus of Ken's work is really fascinating and timely as well - I was just looking through the latest Technology Review from MIT and in it they name 10 Social Web Startups to Watch. The first one out of the gate is Pinger - which allows you to  send voicemail without calling and listen to it on a phone or laptop. Also named is Qik - this  "not only converts cell-phone videos to Flash format but allows Web viewers to send text messages back to the person capturing the video. Then there is Ushahidi - set up during the Kenyan election crisis of last December - this allows anyone to send a text message that is then mapped onto a Google Map. So what i am seeing is a great need for anthropologists to be involved in this mix - cell phones and their use can be exteremely personal and getting at the truth of how people regard and use them could help us better target learning and training ideas on the mobile front.

Second, the U.S. Dept of Defense is moving past the use of human terrain teams to actually partner with the NSF to fund social science research. The Minerva Initiative will focus on such topics as the Chinese military and technology studies, the Iraqi and terrorist perspectives and religious and ideological studies - among otherf things. This move as well as the HTTs has set off a considerable debate in the anthropology community as to the ethics of this kind of partnership. 

IDG: "Anthropology's Technology-driven Renaissance"

(LINK)

I'm not even going to say 'I told you so...' :-)

"Anthropology is an age-old, at times complex discipline, and like many others, it suffers from its fair share of in-fighting and disagreement. It's also a discipline shrouded in mystery. Few people seem to know what anthropology really is or what anthropologists really do, and a general unwillingness to ask simply fuels the mystery further. Few people ever question, for example, what a discipline better known for poking around with dinosaur bones is doing playing with mobile phones or other high-tech gadgets. In today's high-tech world, anthropologists are as visible as anyone. In some projects, they're all that's visible."

The article would have been a lot better however if they had touched on current, exciting impacts being made by anthropologists like Michael Wesch and great blogs like Culture Matters.

The Social Graph...shaping up to be the hot summer song of '08

So kind of like a World War Two bomber pilot flying over enemy territory (its really not that hostile of an intellectual process, its just the image that comes to mind), my limited mind is starting to really be aware of the flak and AAA fire being thrown up around the idea of the social graph. I guess this is only to be expected really. Since we have all bellied up to the social computing Kool-Aid and drunk deeply, it is only right that now we become interested in the kinds of data that can be extracted from these systems.

Dion Hinchcliffe, as per usual, has a good solid explanation of the social graph (and a lovely graphic). Think of it as the study of people and their connections. It is close to social network analysis but is more closely tied to graph theory - hence it's language of nodes and vertices.

There is already a conference, Graphing Social Patterns, Google has an API for it, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote a long article about his thoughts on the topic, even the great mind of Will Thalheimer has turned his attention toward things social and measurable. There are blog posts and reports on social software and even conference name badges that will help you track it.

This all ties into this broader trend I see of bringing the tools and techniques of things like anthrpology and ethnography into new spaces. On that front, there is The Anthropology & Design listserv.....PARC (which used to be Xerox PARC) also does ethnography....which they describe as "Using the systematic observation and analysis of people in their natural environments to glean insights of strategic relevance or interest"...and much more.

Keep the social graph on your radar (back to the bomber metaphor), it certainly warrants study and there are some amazing products starting to hit the market...check out iLink in this pub from SRI...this could be a game-changer within some organizations. Overall though...don't go too far on the first date...this is a promising area that is developing rapidly.

Generational Change in the U.S. Military (strategy+business)

(strategy +business link)

I think this article is nice treatment of the generational shift as it may play out in the U.S. military. There are of course parallels to not only other militaries but to the corporate sector as well. This sounds familiar:

"Not long ago, one of the authors of this article was asked to lead a U.S. Air Force study on the implications for the military of this new online generation. The request came from senior officers who had been appalled to discover a number of junior officers using the still-
permissible Facebook Web site for the purpose of organizing their squadrons. These senior officers were having difficulty with the concept of using a civilian social-networking site for military purposes. What would that mean for military security? How would it affect the control and vulnerability of squadrons in the field? And from the perspective of DOD “middle management,” what was a major supposed to do? Forbid the behavior and risk losing the real benefits of an online community? Or protect it and risk the wrath of more senior officers who just didn’t understand?"

**I should also say kudos to strategy+business for while they do require registration to read this full article online, the full PDF version is freely available with no registration.

Thoughts on the Use of the Word Ethnography

I'm working on a more complete post about the Adaptive Path conference, UX Week 2007, that just finished up yesterday. I did want to go ahead and write something up about a little trend I noticed throughout the conference which caused me both some measure of satisfaction and simultaneously a measure of anxiety.  These feelings are centered around the use of the word "ethnography" and its meaning in this context.

All my grad school work (Master's and doctoral) has been around history and/or anthropology. I've always felt that both disciplines offer a great deal in terms of the rigor and methodological approaches they bring to bear even outside their particular domains. I've been heartened to see more and more "corporate anthropology" being done and I feel that it is a really worthwhile endeavor. At this conference though, the frequency that "ethnography" was mentioned as a research tool for user design projects reached buzzword status.

My anxiety stems from the simple fact that there are methodologies and practices that define the field of ethnographic research. There are even dynamics about how ethnography relates to the larger field of anthropology so that even when we talk about ethnography, it is a bit misleading to speak of it as if it were an entirely separate discipline. So when people look and see that participant observation and key informant interviewing are some of the most often used techniques in ethnography and then go out and interview some people or watch some people and call that ethnography...I have a slight issue.

Knowing Without Memory

One of my favorite people on the Web is Anne Galloway. Found this beauty at her site (see site for cite):

"The encouraging of automatic responses without help of memory may be seen from various further combinations of the word 'sanya': sanya wirad: an arahat or perfect being who needs no power of memory because 'he has acquired a habit of not sinning'; sanya wimok: being without power of memory, where wimok means 'freed from, escaped, delivered from human passion'. Thus the learning of automatic habits, which can be carried on beyond the guidance of conscious memory, is like a step toward the freedom of a saint on his way to Nipphan. When the Thai speak of habits (nitsaj), they are particularly conscious of these automatic, reflexive responses. Any event, rolling on from its own precedent, depends in part upon human memory and effort. Thus memory, for the Thai, is not a passive storehouse of traces but an active force like will."

Hmmm......if nothing else, I find this passage an eloquent if brief reminder that as much as with history and politics, we need to look beyond our own national boundaries and cultures to really develop an understanding on learning, meaning and memory.

Interview with the Man Behind the Web 2.0 Video

Remember this GREAT video? Well John Batelle now has an interview with the man behind it...Michael Wesch. I'll let you read the whole interview on John's blog but here is a clip and it gets to why people should hire more anthropologists... ;-)

"For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected."

Trash Then and Trash Now

So I am actually a card-carrying anthropologist - did the coursework, did the fieldwork. One thing you learn is that much of what prior generations leave us is their garbage; the physical remains of their daily existence. These pictures struck me as incredible when seen from the eyes of someone who will be digging these up in 10,000 years. Amazing how the scale (even on an object by object basis) has changed so dramatically.

Always pays to read the reviews first...

...I guess this is from the 'all the glitters is not gold' category. I saw this book, Anthropology and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the 21st Century,  mentioned on someone's site and thought it was great that someone had combined by passion for the military and for anthropology in one volume. Then I read the Amazon.com reviews.

While there are only three, they sound the same chord (maybe its the same person - who knows):
"Shoddy, Sloppy, Lack of Scholarship, July 2, 2004
Reviewer: A reader
A poorly written and organized collection of essays. I wish I could get my money back on this book and want to know who subsidized the printing of this book at Palgrave. Many of these papers seem to be first drafts of quickly written conference papers (for example see: Rubinstein's unconnected paper) and others a just plain preachy (see: Simons or Frese essays). If you ever wondered just how low the standards of writing and scholarship are outside of the university system: read this collection and wonder no more. I get better papers from my first year graduate students."

I would love to hear from others who may have encountered this work.