’’It‘s Just a Matter of Common Sense‘‘: Ethnography as Invisible Work

  • Authors:

  • Diana E. Forsythe

  • Affiliations:

  • Medical Anthropology Program, University of California, 1350 Seventh Avenue, Room 101 San Francisco, CA 94143-0850, USA forsythe@sccm.stanford.edu

  • Venue:
  • Computer Supported Cooperative Work - Special issue: a web on the wind: the structure of invisible work
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Anthropologists have been usingethnographic methods since the 1970s to support thedesign and evaluation of software. While early use ofsuch skills in the design world was viewed asexperimental, at least by computer scientists andengineers, ethnography has now become established asa useful skill in technology design. Not only arecorporations and research laboratories employinganthropologists to take part in the developmentprocess, but growing numbers of non-anthropologistsare attempting to borrow ethnographic techniques. Theresults of this appropriation have brought out intothe open a kind of paradox: while ethnography looksand sounds straightforward, this is not really thecase. The work of untrained ethnographers tends tooverlook things that anthropologists see as importantparts of the research process. The consistency of thispattern suggests that some aspects of ethnographicfieldwork are invisible to the untrained eye. Inshort, ethnography would appear to constitute anexample of invisible work. Drawing on my own decade ofexperience as an anthropologist working in design, Iattempt to clarify the nature of ethnographicexpertise, describe six misconceptions aboutethnography that I have encountered among scientists,and present real-life examples to illustrate whyquasi-ethnographic work based on these misconceptionsis likely to be superficial and unreliable.