Abstract
This chapter elaborates the relationship between ethnography and systems design. It addresses the turn to the social that occurred in the late 1980s as the computer moved out of the research lab and into our collective lives, and the corresponding need that designers had to find ways of factoring the social into design. It does so from the point of view of people who initially developed the ethnographic approach for systems designs, notably that cohort of sociologists and software engineers who came to be known as the Lancaster School. We provide a brief account of the impetus towards the turn to the social before moving on to consider how members of the Lancaster School set about addressing this problem of factoring the social into design through ethnography and what was involved in doing it. This is not a formal account but rather an informal one based on interviews with sociologists and software engineers who were there at the off so to speak. This retrospective brings to the fore the practical concerns that motivated both parties, the contexts in which they were working at the time, and the foundational need to develop a constructive relationship between ethnography and systems design. That is to say, the need to have ethnography help designers figure out what to build and to help them determine what works and what doesn’t. These are still extremely salient issues today. They underpin ethnography’s ongoing relevance to systems design and frame the following chapters in which we explicate the work involved in doing ethnography and relating it to systems development.
Software systems do not exist in isolation. They are used in a social and organisational context. Satisfying these social and organisational requirements is often critical for the success of the system. One reason why many software systems are delivered but never used is that their requirements do not take proper account of how the social and organisational context affects the practical operation of the system.
Ian Sommerville
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Notes
- 1.
For a primer in ethnographic studies for design see Button and Sharrock (2009).
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Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., Tolmie, P. (2012). Ethnography and Systems Design. In: Doing Design Ethnography. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2726-0_2
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