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In October 1974, the French writer George Perec set himself down for 3 days in a café at the Place Saint-Suplice in Paris, where he observed the goings-on and made notes. In his Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010), he records among other things: “Asphalt,” “Some sort of basset hound,” “Human beings,” “Bread (baguette)” (2010, p. 6). He does not see the square as an ensemble or the bus as a means of transportation; rather he sees individual living beings, things, and signs. He doesn’t comment, doesn’t interpret. His intention consists in describing “[…] that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing other happens than the weather, people, cars, and clouds” (2010, p. 3). Perec inventories the things and people of everyday reality. He wants to suspend the certainties with which we classify everyday reality. Of course, this can only go so far, especially since Perec does speak of “cars” and not of colorful metal shells moving forward on wheels (and even this description is based on an arbitrary language). It is thus accurate to speak of an attempt, and in particular of a phenomenological one—that is, one that investigates reality as it reveals itself to us aesthetically—and not an ontological one. It is of course not as if Perec leaves Plato’s cave by means of his experiment; rather, he is simply sitting in a café and playing just a little bit with the reality that presents itself to us.

Even if Perec seems like a purely passive observer, he is active. He may not be altering what is happening on the square, but what happens alters him. By shifting his gaze and seeing “other” things, or seeing the same things differently, he deliberately perceives the world differently. Perec is not simply a visitor to the café; he is an observer, an author. He lingers in the café to write a literary text. His gaze is open and paradoxically intentional at the same time: by seeing something, he does not see something else. Seeing always produces “blind spots” (Maturana and Varela 2003, p. 13). Perec demonstrates that we do not necessarily need to travel to the Amazon in order to enter another world. A visit to the nearest café on a square in our familiar city, a pen, a notebook, and some time are sufficient. The other, strange world is here. We are in its midst.

By putting his observations into written form, Perec draws on a pre-fabricated language that classifies through naming (Strauss 2017, p. 17 ff.). Thus Perec brings forth a world through language: an experimental literary text; a text of the OuLiPo movement. At the same time, his text has an epistemic quality. Perec recognizes something—namely, that the reality in our everyday world is contingent. This recognition can be neither generalized nor translated into hypotheses that could be verified or disproven.

Perec’s experimental process—“experimental” not in the strictly scientific sense—is relevant to design ethnography for the following reasons. First, it is focused, because Perec observes a very specific section of reality—Place Saint-Sulpice. Second, the process, which can seem paradoxical with regard to the first point, is open: Within the selected section, Perec observes more or less “everything.” Of course, this openness does not necessarily lead him to see “more,” much less to see “objectively”: the latter could be achieved, for instance, by means of quantification. One might count the number of cars, pigeons, and people—but that is not the point. Perec simply sees something else—a blind spot that is hidden in everyday life. Third, his observation period is relatively brief: 3 days, which is not long in comparison to typical ethnographic studies, in which researchers spend months or even years immersed in other lifeworlds. The fact that a book was produced on the basis of 3 days in a café presupposes a large amount of notes. Thus, his observation is—fourth—data intensive. And fifth, finally, Perec communicates his observation. It is only possible for us to consider Perec and his experiment here because we have his text. Only this written form makes the inner world of his thought accessible to intersubjective connection. Without text, whatever Perec observed would remain a fluid event in his subjective consciousness—without the possibility of communicative connection.

Instead of asking what Perec sees, one might ask what he doesn’t see: Perec no longer sees everyday reality in aggregate as an ensemble—or at least, he attempts to detach himself from it. Ensemble in this context means that when we see certain things and signs, we complete them to form a larger whole. We see a vehicle passing by quickly and know that it is a car. We do not see the car in its entirety—not every one of its four wheels, not the hood (much less what is under it), probably not the make of the car, and perhaps not even its color. We see (or hear) only a few individual elements and fill in the rest. The Polish immunologist and philosopher Ludwig Fleck describes this completion of the everyday as follows:

We walk around without seeing any points, lines, angles, lights, or shadows, from which we would have to arrange ‘what is this’ by synthesis or reasoning, but we see at once a house, a memorial in square, a detachment of soldiers, a bookshop window, a group of children, a lady with a dog, all of them ready forms. (Fleck 1986, p. 134)

This completion takes place in our unconscious, but it comes about through knowledge that we have acquired and internalized in a process of socialization.

2.1 The Incorporation of Everyday Knowledge

The sociologists Hans-Georg Soeffner and Jürgen Raab write: “We do not perceive the world around us ‘as such,’ but rather, through seeing, we ‘clip’ it into shape for ourselves” (2004, p. 266). To illustrate this with an example from our everyday world of consumption: Shopping in a supermarket is a perfectly ordinary act for people in Western societies. If we shop frequently in the same supermarket, it becomes purely routine. We know what we are looking for and go automatically toward the right section. For instance, we want to buy a six-pack of beer, so we head for the appropriate area of the beverage section and look there for our favorite brand. We ignore the wine, just like we ignore the salad and the dairy products—unless we are tempted by clever marketing psychology to buy more than we originally wanted, but that is not at issue here. The point, rather, is that the routine act of “buying beer” delimits our perception and reduces complexity. Ultimately, we get our six-pack and bring it to the register. We pay in cash or with a credit card. We do not need to understand the monetarization of the economy or the credit system in order to complete the payment transaction. It suffices to have the money or a credit card.

As mundane as the experience of the supermarket is in everyday life, it is nonetheless a rather complex phenomenon dependent on a wealth of preconditions that already begins outside on the street with the signs (for instance, the logos), which indicate what is inside—that there, we will find food, beverages, household items, etc. It includes a very specific, often somewhat sterile, arrangement of the interior space and a taxonomic organization of products (all the different kinds of beer, for instance, in one place). It includes too a very specific material culture: shelving, registers, shopping carts, shopping baskets, products labeled with prices and bar codes and organized into specific categories. There are, roughly speaking, two types of people in a supermarket: employees and visitors. The first are identified by a particular uniform and by the fact that they are performing different activities in the supermarket than the visitors and are behaving differently. The second type includes customers, but also thieves and window-shoppers.

A supermarket depends on many preconditions: It could not exist without a capitalist market economy, industrial production, a monetarized economy, logistics, transportation, and advertising. A multitude of historical and cultural contingencies has led to the existence of supermarkets. We do not need to know this historical and cultural background in order to shop in a supermarket in everyday life. We use merely an implicit everyday knowledge—a knowing-in-action (Schön 1983, p. 51 ff.) or skilled practices (Ingold 2011, p. 60).

We come into the world more or less as a blank slate and develop our identity or habitus—by which is meant patterns of perception, classification, and interpretation of the world—though socialization (Bourdieu 2010, p. 257 ff.). We have internalized such knowledge and have no need to either reflect upon it or articulate it, since it resides in the self-evident features of everyday life (Soeffner 2004, p. 25). In the supermarket and in the reality of everyday life we operate to a certain extent “blindly.” This reality of everyday life is only breached by a disruption. It is “interrupted by the appearance by a problem” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 24). In the context of the supermarket, this happens for instance when the manned cash register is 1 day replaced by a self-service scanner. As long as both check-out systems exist in parallel, I can refuse the scanner—in the worst case, I will have to accept a longer wait for the register. But when the last register is closed, then I must learn to deal with the scanner despite my reluctance. The first interaction with the scanner forces me to reflect upon the routine nature of the act of shopping. Crises and disruptions can therefore lead us to reflect upon situations that we usually experience as “normal” (Schön 1983, p. 59 ff.).

One might now wonder what all this has to do with design. One initial answer is offered by the American Nobel Prize winner Herbert A. Simon. His thesis in his 1969 book, The Science of the Artificial, posited among other things that we live in an artificial—that is, man-made—world: We spend most of our time in spaces that have an artificially regulated temperature of around 20 °C and artificially pipe in or take away humidity. Even the impure air we inhale is something we produced ourselves (Simon 1996, p. 2).

Our world is artificial and designed. The longing for nature, so particularly widespread in the German-speaking world, is itself also something artificial—that is, a cultural construction that goes back to the reverential appreciation of nature in German Romanticism. And it does little or nothing to change the fact that we use smartphones, light switches, and refrigerators; that we wear clothes, get haircuts, take care of our bodies, ride bicycles, fly to other cities in airplanes, etc. That is to say, we are socialized into a designed world.

Socialization turns our reality into the reality of everyday life, which is the subject of the next chapter. This refers to the portion of reality that we experience as “normal”—which would include the Place Saint-Suplice in Paris, or any other place in the world that we walk through without giving it a second thought. We come from somewhere and are on our way to somewhere else. We know where we are. The place is simply there—we pay no attention to it.