Tutorial – Fieldwork for Design

Instructors: Dave Randall (Manchester Metropolitan University), John Rooksby (University of St Andrews) & Mark Rouncefield (Lancaster University)

Goals and Content: The tutorial has the objective of developing an appreciation of the various and practical issues that arise during the conduct of ‘naturalistic’ enquiry – ‘fieldwork’. Competing perspectives will be examined, compared and contrasted. The tutorial will assess competing claims concerning the relevance of the ‘social setting’ in which work takes place and the consequences for system development. We argue that the study of socially organised cooperation is central to new generations of systems in both organisational and domestic contexts.

· Participants will learn the relevance of theoretical perspectives to the practice of fieldwork, and to the problem of capturing social complexity.

· The practical problems, strategies and choices of the fieldworker in performing observational studies will be discussed.

· Experiences gleaned from a range of studies in commercial and industrial settings, domestic environments and public spaces – will be examined. For this tutorial there will be a particular emphasis on studies of systems developers.

· Problems of method, communication and comprehension in collaborations between ethnographer and system developer will be presented.

· There will be online access to comprehensive notes and an annotated bibliography. It will review and build on existing literature on ethnography, systems design, and change management but will endeavour to maintain a practical focus.

Intended Learning Outcomes: Fieldwork must be adequate to interdisciplinary tasks. To ensure this, our emphasis is on the sharing of expertise and on training – these are skills that can be learned. There is an emerging ‘body politic’, a set of tools and assumptions that are beginning to be used to evaluate and comment on matters of empirical adequacy, scope, relevance, tractability and so on. These tools can be acquired through training and the sharing of experience and expertise. It entails a hybrid of skills and tools from the ‘ethnographic’ and the ‘fieldwork’ tradition; it involves the use of a wide set of conceptual tools and concerns; and it requires a dynamic and flexible approach to its role in a design process. And finally, it requires a particular view about evidence, its evaluation and its use, and about the role of evidence generated by other disciplinary-specific approaches to fieldwork.

Intended audience: The tutorial will be of use to those who are intending to embark on observational studies themselves, and to system developers who wish to become familiar with issues arising from the adoption of observational methods.

About the instructors:

Dave Randall, is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.  He has been involved in a range of projects including; Air Traffic Control; retail finance; museums and domestic environments.  He is a co-author of the book Fieldwork for Design.

John Rooksby, is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews.  He has conducted fieldwork investigations of healthcare and systems development.

Mark Rouncefield, is a Microsoft European Research Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow at Lancaster University has conducted fieldwork investigations of financial services; managerial work; healthcare and domestic environments.  He is a co-author of the book Fieldwork for Design.