Curator: Rogerio de Paula (Intel Corp.)

The Martial Ethnographic Arts
Suzanne L. Thomas (Intel Corp.)

There is longevity to the ethnographic arts: a report referred back to over the years, a photo that captures a resiliently fresh truth, a chart of a common practice that renders it momentarily foreign and, as a result, suddenly intelligible.  In cruder words, ethnographic analysis has a longer shelf life than traditional market research.  The latter requires tending and updating to keep its categories replete with a fresh cast of characters. The former is distinguished by a methodological discipline that keeps it fresh and truthful without the necessity of being, for only the moment, a truth.
There is a mastery of the ethnographic arts. For the last twenty years, I have practiced on all sides of the ethnographic practice – as a student and academic, as a consultant and now as a corporate practitioner. 
Now, given the recession, I hire ethnographers. I confess: I have become an armchair anthropologist.  As a result, I have had the necessity of discerning what makes some ethnographic practice masterful and some not. In my paper, I divide this mastery into three practices: documentary finesse, journeying and discipline (the latter more yogic than Foucaultian).  Each fuels the longevity of our truthfulness and our work.

The ‘Inner Game’ of Ethnography
Stokes Jones (Lodestar, Institute of Design-IIT)

“Doing ethnography” in industry has come to be identified with its ‘outer game’. Deliverables such as experience models, personas, and opportunity matrices have overshadowed the actual ‘way’ of practicing ethnography, which has remained a ‘black box’ immune to normative standards.
This paper will argue the time has come to re-embrace a sense of craft whereby our standards are self-defined (rather than through the marketplace). But instead of arguing renewal must be catalyzed primarily through engagement between expert communities, I will put individual performance at the center of ethnographic practice.
Beginning from each practitioner’s feelings of discontent, with the untapped potential inherent in every ethnographic encounter (paths not taken, opportunities need not wasted if only I had been more aware ‘in the moment’) this paper will look for the embodied foundations of a more disciplined way forward for ethnography.
Drawing on awareness techniques from the human potential movement, itself already adapted for concentration-intensive sports like tennis, this paper proposes a turn towards the ‘inner game’ of ethnography.
As this leads practitioners to tighten norms on today’s unseen ethnographic practices, it can end the double-game between inner and outer standards and increase the discipline’s authority such that it better fulfills its promise.
 
Making Silence Matter: The Place of the Absences in Ethnography
Brian Rappert (University of Exeter)

Recurring attention in recent years to what ethnographers can and cannot disclose as part of their accounts has extended the range of concerns pertaining to the relation between investigators and those they study.
When researchers are working under conditions characterised by secrecy and a limited access to information, then the difficulties faced in offering accounts are all the more acute.
This presentation examines the political, ethical, and epistemological challenges associated with how we manage what is missing within our writing. The argument is based on an original ethnographic engagement within diplomatic and security policy communities over a five-year period. I want to consider the representational implications of the disclosure rules, confidentiality agreements, informal arrangements, etc. associated with contemporary research.
I also want to go further though to ask what novel writing strategies and methods could enable us to undertake a critical and evocative engagement with the worlds we study. My basic orientation has been to seek forms of writing that exemplify the negotiation of disclosure and concealment between investigators and those they study in the relation between authors and their readers. In doing so, a goal has been to determine how limits to what can be said could figure as a productive part of our research accounts.

The Way to Design Ethnography for Public Service: The Barriers and Solutions in Japanese Local Government.
Kunikazu Amagasa (Keio University)

This paper will illustrate the barrier to introduce ethnographic approach for improvement of public service design in Japan, and discuss the way to overcome such barriers.　
Service design approach with using ethnography is getting more popular among public sector, especially in Europe. On the other hand, Japanese local government has adapted little or no ethnographic approach in order to improve their public services. One of the most powerful barrier factors is the long lasting relationship between citizens and local public agencies. Even though Japanese society emphasizes the rights of all citizens and the duties of public agency in response to the demand, some loud demanding citizens’ try to make agencies prioritize certain service issues. This makes local public agencies difficult to conduct ethnographic research freely and understand their citizens in depth. For these local authorities and “professional citizens”, finding the problems with ethnography denies their knowledge, scouting and training new people (ethnographer) who are solving the problems denies their roles.
Professional citizens and ethnographer for public service design are competing against each other.
In order to overcome the barriers, this paper is proposing how we could choose research informant in a strategic way with balancing the power of the local community, and save the diversity of the action group.

The Do and Jutsu of Strategic Ethnography: Balancing the way and the art of understanding
Lucas McCann, Corin Ludwig (Design Concepts) & Matt Mullins (Independent Researcher)

In Japan, martial arts emerged from a long period of violence . Once warring ceased, philosophical practices formed on this foundation of effective technique. These martial arts are called by names ending in –jutsu (“technique”) and –do (“way”), respectively. In ethnography we see the process reversed. From ethnography’s rich tradition of understanding for understanding’s sake grew the practical art of understanding as a means to an end. But strip portions of the practice or technique from the philosophy or way, and problems sprout.
For social research to remain relevant, practitioners must strive to embody the essential spirit of ethnography’s philosophical path. Understanding people is the Do of ethnography. The Jutsu of ethnography effectively applies this understanding. In martial arts, Do and Jutsu practiced by masters look virtually identical. In the field of design research, we similarly balance understanding and application to deliver strategic solutions. However, external factors push this practice to become more predictable and thereby threaten this balance.
Using the analogy of Do and Jutsu in the martial arts, we explore the challenges that strategic ethnography faces today.

Humility and Ethnographic Claims
Rick E Robinson (Sideriver Ventures)

The fall of Icarus—wax melting, loosed feathers eddying as he plunges from the sky into the sea— is a central image in western mythology. A metaphor for the risks of hubris, it is also a provocative figure through which to think about the value which ethnographic research claims and the range of reactions to those claims. In 14th and 15th century painting, the Fall of Icarus was a relatively common theme for artists (and their patrons). But with a different emphasis than the way myth is recounted today: in the great Italian and Northern Renaissance paintings, it is Daedalus, father to Icarus, who is the sympathetic center of the tale.
As inventor of both the fabulous wings and the labyrinth from which they enabled father and son to escape, Daedalus the craftsman, architect and inventor was resourceful, competent, and –except for the moment which landed him in King Minos’ service—an interesting blend of great vision and humility. In this paper I combine an analysis of the kinds of claims made for research from a range of ethnographic research groups (on websites, in articles, and marketing materials) with a critical look at what ethnographic research in industry has accomplished (focusing on simple conceptual contributions such as Suchman’s ‘ready to hand’ (1986) or heuristics like AEIOU (Blomberg, Burrell & Guest, 2002)) to make an argument for a less splashily promotable notion of what the field contributes, can contribute, and how it might best work with its partner disciplines: design, technology, engineering, strategy, and so on.
The nature of the claims that ethnographers make when representing themselves to the business world has an enormous impact on the expectations that our professional interlocutors have of the field as whole. This paper argues that a number of the central claims used to market the work have the slightly perverse impact of limiting the range and nature of the types of inquiry that observational and ethnographic practices are understood to provide. “Discovering user needs” and the various forms of “product innovation” – each a class of claim—implicitly frame the work as “about” those ends in ways that elide much of the scope and diversity the work is capable of accomplishing.
Recently (the winter of 2010) the language of some of those claims has come back around as criticism from some fairly prominent technology writers (e.g. Donald Norman, 2010). This paper will use the analysis of current claims, contrasted and compared to an older tradition of what ethnographic work ‘does.’ In part, this paper seeks to extend the descriptive vocabulary that the EPIC 2009 paper, “let’s bring it up to b flat” (Robinson, 2009) introduced. It examines the ways in which the pursuit of differentiating value claims might d the kinds of work which have resulted in fundamental changes to industry, and tries to clarify how we can be more clear in what we do, have a much larger horizon for inquiry, and have more sustainable claim to expertise and value, by a ‘way’ that is closer to that of Daedalus than that of Icarus.