Abstract
In “Design Ethnography,” the authors take a close look at the nuances of conducting fieldwork with informants and working together toward creating desirable futures. Thus, taking inspiration from Ehrensal (2019), if this journal allowed to give titles to book reviews, I would call this one “Fieldwork with an Impact.”
The book is a collaborative endeavor of six researchers (all women, I might add), each with over a decade of experience in various fields, including design studies, sociology, and anthropology. Drawing on their experience conducting fieldwork, the authors describe design ethnography as an approach that—as the name suggests—blends ethnographic methods and design practices to engage researchers and informants in discovery and change processes. Design ethnography advocates for collaboration between researchers and practitioners to learn, envision, and realize desirable, ethical, and responsible futures alongside the same people being studied. Thus, on the one hand, similar to Lewin’s (1946) “action research,” design ethnography offers a perspective to researching, designing, and intervening in complex socio-technical and socio-material contexts. On the other hand, unlike action research, design ethnography explicitly foregrounds creative problem-solving and generative design practices as means uniquely equipped to achieve desirable futures.
This has two notable implications. First, design ethnography embraces Ingold’s (2013) understanding of anthropology in the sense that “[a]nthropology is studying with [people] and learning from [people]; it is carried forward in a process of life, and effects transformations within that process” (p. 3). Design ethnography requires the researcher to go beyond the role of “participant-as-observer,” who takes part in the life of people they study (Gold, 1958; see also, Seim, 2021 for a recent discussion of “observant participation”), to encompass active involvement in bringing about transformation and improvement. This was abundantly clear in the many examples with various scopes of intervention that enrich the book, such as Duque’s work as a volunteer and manager at a secondhand charity shop or Fors and Pink’s experimentation with self-tracking technologies.
Second, the three concepts of desirability, ethics, and responsibility serve as a major thread that connects the numerous examples presented in the book, which range from evaluating architectural acoustic design to experimenting with self-driving cars to revaluing damaged banknotes. For example, the authors report that people engaged in design interventions to repair banknotes by taping and stapling them with the ultimate goal of keeping them in circulation, while artists engaged in “intentional alterations” of those same banknotes with the intent of calling “attention into historical, political, economic and wider cultural tensions of inequities” (p. 124). Design ethnography, therefore, is intertwined with and advocates for creating desirable futures through ethical and responsible practices that uncover and address challenges relevant to society. As the authors argue, “[d]esign ethnography is rooted in academic scholarship as much as in practice and needs to conceptualise transformation as a process of change, while also sensing it in practice” (p. 100).
The book is organized into 10 chapters, with each chapter bringing to the fore the value of design ethnography in understanding the past and present, envisioning the future, developing change, and ensuring the involvement of stakeholders. The first two chapters are dedicated to introducing readers to the overall approach and the techniques for conducting design ethnography. In particular, these chapters place emphasis on the active role of participants, including people, other species, and technologies. They also highlight the importance of ethical and responsible co-research and co-creation. The subsequent chapters (Chapters 3–9) dive into design ethnography, exploring how it can be used to build insights with participants about current situations and possible scenarios (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), to intervene and transform the field (Chapter 6), to reframe the idea of value (Chapter 7), and to imagine and generate better futures (Chapters 8 and 9). The chapters are enriched with examples and anecdotes from the authors’ fieldwork that demonstrate the practical applications of design ethnography, especially in addressing societal problems and working with new technologies. The examples illustrate everyday micro-interactions (both among people and between human and non-human actants, Latour, 1987) that, by encompassing sensory reactions, struggles, and workarounds, define people’s lived experiences, which, in turn, represent the foundations for making progress toward better futures. The final chapter (Chapter 10) is dedicated to engagement: Design ethnography necessitates intense engagement to study and challenge current understandings and tackle the unknown. More importantly, this last chapter serves as a reminder or a word of caution that we should “know when not to engage, or when to deliberately disengage” (p. 179) from research that fails to take ethical obligations seriously. In summary, the chapters showcase design ethnography as a collaborative approach actively involving researchers, people, stakeholders, and (material and digital) artifacts to anticipate, imagine, and shape futures.
Before highlighting the strengths of this book, I want to mention its main weaknesses. The book chronicles what researchers did rather than how they did it and it reads as a collection of trade stories rather than a rich ethnographic book (e.g. Fine, 1996; Van Maanen, 1988; Wohl, 2021). Nor does it read as a methodological book on how to design and conduct rigorous design ethnographies (for that, I would recommend reading Jackson, 1990, on writing fieldnotes; Golden-Biddle and Locke, 1993, on writing convincing ethnographic studies; and Fine, 1993; and Van Maanen, 1983, on the ethics of fieldwork). I would have loved to read more about how the authors went about gaining access to the research field and selecting informants, as well as how different depths and scopes of their field studies influenced their ability to understand informants’ experiences, especially the elusive, embodied ones (e.g., Vertesi, 2015).
Nonetheless, if you are in search of a book that highlights the importance of taking responsibility as a researcher, you don’t need to look any further. Design ethnography encourages us to be accountable for our actions in the field and highlights the importance of conducting research that foregrounds ethical outcomes. It urges us to commit to societal improvement when we design and conduct field studies by working alongside those we study to collaboratively accomplish a more equitable and sustainable future. As the authors highlight time and time again, neither academic disciplines nor practices should dominate as we conduct research. In this sense, the traditional “fly-on-the-wall” approach to qualitative research is no longer sufficient: We need to work closely with the cultures and socio-technical and sociomaterial realities we study to envision and co-create better futures. As the authors brilliantly write, their book argues “for a shift towards a more collective, shared and collaborative mode of responsibility and suggest[s] that design ethnographic practice plays a key role in a move in this direction” (p. 144). Therefore, much like an action research approach (Dickens and Watkins, 1999; Lewin, 1946), design ethnography pushes researchers to become future-makers instead of mere observers of the future as it unfolds. But, unlike action research, design ethnography explicitly integrates design practices, such as material problem-solving and co-creation (Fayard et al., 2017) that help muddle through the high ambiguity that defines unknown futures.
