Andy Crabtree axccs.nott.ac.uk

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• Ethnomethodology and IT Research
• Present and Future

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Present and future
• Moving away from the workplace
• Challenges of diversification
• EM studies in alternate settings and continued
  purchase of EM
• Development of interdisciplinary research method
  based on performance in the wild

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Diversification
• As digital technologies proliferate the Human
  Computer Interaction (HCI) community has turned
  its attention from the workplace and productivity
  tools towards domestic design environments and
  non-utilitarian activities.
• Bell et al. Designing Culturally Situated
  Technologies for the Home
• Not only the home but our initial focus

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Emergence of research mythologies
• In the workplace, applications tend to focus on
  productivity and efficiency and involve
  relatively well-understood requirements and
  methodologies, but beyond this we are faced with
  the need to support new classes of activities.
• HCI already draws on non-engineering
  disciplines such as ethnography in order to
  better understand experience.
• Current understanding of user needs analysis,
  derived from the world of work is not adequate to
  this new design challenge.
• Bell et al. Designing Culturally
  Situated Technologies for the Home

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Why is this a mythology?
• While this may hold true for design it does not
  do so for ethnomethodology, as ethnography or
  workplace studies is not a method. Rather, the
  notion of workplace studies is no more and no
  less than a convenient label emerging from
  interdisciplinary work to describe the focus of
  ethnomethodological studies in the historical
  context of design. As design today moves out of
  the workplace, ethnomethodological studies may
  just as easily be re-categorised as studies of
  everyday life to reflect the original analytic
  impetus of ethnomethodological studies

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Responding to diversification
• Its not that somebody is ordinary it takes
  work some kind of effort, training, etc.
  Among the ways you go about doing being an
  ordinary person is spending your time in usual
  ways so that all you have to do to be an
  ordinary person in the evening, is turn on the
  TV set. Its not that it happens that youre
  doing what lots of ordinary people are doing, but
  that you know that the way to do having a usual
  evening is to do that. Its not just that youre
  selecting, Gee Ill watch TV tonight, but
  youre making a job of, and finding an answer to,
  how to do being ordinary tonight.
• Harvey Sacks Doing being ordinary

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• What does that mean?
• Doing being ordinary as modus operandi in
  diverse settings
• What is the ordinary work of a setting as made
  visible in the day-to-day doings of its
  members?
• This is a basic focus for EM studies, but what
  about a focus for design?

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Doings of relevance to design
• Heres an object introduced into a world. And
  its a technical thing which has a variety of
  aspects to it. Now what happens is, a culture
  secretes itself onto it in its well-shaped ways
  and it develops into something with its own
  social structure. And thats a thing thats
  routinely being done, and its the source for the
  failures of technocratic dreams that if only we
  introduced some fantastic new machine the world
  will be transformed. Where what happens is that
  the object is made at home in the world that has
  whatever organization it already has.
• Edited extract Harvey Sacks A Single Instance of
  a Phone-call Opening

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• The social structure of objects-in-use
• thats a thing thats routinely being done
• Studying the routine character of technology
  use in alternate settings
• Explicating the routine to uncover the ordinary
  day-to-day work of setting
• Ordinariness as a resource for innovation
• in order to understand the adoption/use
  issues of computers, one must view the total
  technological space of the household very
  little insights will be gained by looking at
  computers alone.
• Alladi Venkatesh New Technologies for the Home

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• The routine character of everyday life
• Routines as repetitive actions vs. routines as
  artful accomplishments
• action always has to undergo a process of
  formation even though it may be a
  well-established and repetitive form of action,
  each instance of it has to be formed anew.
• Herbert Blumer The Methodological
  Position of Symbolic Interactionism
• More precisely, what are the material
  (equipmentally affiliated) practices involved in
  the formation or production of the routine?

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Studying alternate settings
• Look at the ordinary work of a setting as made
  available in members doings
• With a particular focus on the routine ways in
  technology broadly construed is used in the
  course of those doings
• Explicate the accomplished character of routine
  uses
• Identify the practices whereby culture secretes
  itself onto objects in the accomplishment of the
  routine
• Come to see how technology socially organized
  and made at home in alternate settings (JCSCW)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• The purchase of such an approach
• The challenge for designers is to pay heed to
  the stable and compelling routines of the home,
  rather than external factors, including the
  abilities of the technology itself. These
  routines are subtle, complex, and
  ill-articulated, if they are articulated at all
  thus there is a great need for further studies of
  how home occupants appropriate and adapt new
  technologies.
• While new homes may eventually be purpose-built
  for smart applications, existing homes are not
  designed as such. Perhaps homeowners may decide
  to upgrade their homes to support these new
  technologies. But it seems more likely that new
  technologies will be brought piecemeal into the
  home unlike the lab houses that serve as
  experiments in domestic technology today these
  homes are not custom designed from the start to
  accommodate and integrate these technologies.
• Edwards Grinter At Home with Ubiquitous
  Computing

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Technology use in domestic routines
• Ethnographic studies 20 households
• Various composition (couples, families)
• Fixed recording and video diaries
• What, where, when, and why?
• Mail, phones, calendars, address books,
  photographs, noticeboards, tables, computers .
  WHATEVER

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Findings
• Social organization of individual technologies
• E.g., calendars annotations and coordination
  protocols (ECSCW)
• Or photographs and interactional practices of
  photo-talk (CSCW)
• Or mail (Situated Displays OHara et al.)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• The social organization of mail
• See the social structure of technology use
• How the culture secretes itself onto technology
  in details of practices for accomplishing the
  routine
• Draws attention to ecological character of
  routine uses of technology in the home
• Or the importance of space

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Explicating the ecological character of
  technology use
• Ecological habitats (places where technology
  lives)
• Activity centres (places where technology is
  used)
• Coordinate displays (places where media are
  displayed and made available to residents to
  coordinate their activities)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Different spatial sites assume different
  functions at different times

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Bricolage ad hoc configuration of technologies
  and/or media at functional sites

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• The importance of placement and assembly to
  accomplishing the routines that technology use is
  embedded in
• Informing RD
• Placement identifying prime sites for design
  (e.g., roomware, comZONEs, etc., and noticeboard,
  table, and workstation- creating a distributed
  interactive habitat)
• Assembly need to develop support for dynamics of
  interaction, specifically, for ad hoc user
  configuration and reconfiguration of FET

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• Ethnomethodology IT Research
• RD supporting assembly
• Developing a component model (see Equip Component
  Toolkit _at_ UbiComp 2004)
• Interaction mechanism jigsaw editor enabling
  users to rapidly configure and reconfigure
  assemblies of components

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• Ethnomethodology IT Research
• RD supporting assembly
• Developing a component model (see Equip Component
  Toolkit _at_ UbiComp 2004)
• Interaction mechanism jigsaw editor enabling
  users to rapidly configure and reconfigure
  assemblies of components

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Value of research
• Sensitizing concepts
• Informing RD
• Developing for piecemeal migration of FET to
  the home
• Doing so in collaboration with potential
  end-users (cooperative analysis and situated
  evaluation - DIS 04)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• So whats new about diversification?
• EM doing same job as before, underpinned by same
  core practices (doing ethnographic studies, thick
  description, sensitizing concepts, etc.) just in
  different settings
• However, new challenges of contemporary IT
  research the absence of practice
• Emergence of new interdisciplinary research
  method to handle challenge
• Innovation rather than design

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Interdisciplinarity in the absence of practice
• So just how is EM, and ethnography more
  generally, to proceed when there are no existing
  practices to study?

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Steve Mann - performance in the wild as
  interdisciplinary research method
• Manns work challenges much of academia due to
  its interdisciplinary nature, experimental
  design, confrontational positioning and
  performativity. The nature of his design work and
  inquiry puts him in conflict with many
  requirements for academic research such as the
  ethics of informed consent, explicit
  methodologies and research agendas requirements
  that lead most academics to work in labs,
  controlled spaces, and existing literature.
• Mann et al. Technomimesis

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• So what makes Manns research so radical?
• His background in engineering, computers, and
  performance art as both forms of expression and
  tools for social inquiry have allowed him to
  directly engage social issues as part of an
  emergent research design agenda situated in
  ethnomethodology and action research
  (Technomimesis)
• Key is the EM notion of breaching experiments
• We describe and analyze performances that
  follow Harold Garfinkels ethnomethodological
  approach to breaching norms. (Sousveillance)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Mann working on a common reading of breaching
  experiments
• Procedurally it is my preference to start with
  familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make
  trouble to produce and sustain bewilderment,
  consternation, and confusion anxiety, shame,
  guilt, and indignation to produce disorganized
  interaction should tell us something about how
  the structures of everyday activities are
  ordinarily and routinely produced and
  maintained.
• Harold Garfinkel Studies in Ethnomethodology

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• However, the social order is a moral order
• IT research is part and parcel of the moral order
• Ethics are important we cant just go around
  making trouble in the name of research
• So what possible value can breaching experiments
  have?

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Respecting the spirit of the procedure
• A word of reservation. Despite their procedural
  emphasis, my studies are not properly speaking
  experimental. They are demonstrations, designed,
  in Herbert Spiegelbergs phrase, as aids to a
  sluggish imagination. I have found that they
  produce reflections through which the strangeness
  of an obstinately familiar world can be
  detected.
• Harold Garfinkel Studies in
  Ethnomethodology

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• An alternative reading
• Interviews bartering
• Not always causing anxiety, bewilderment, guilt,
  shame
• Making trouble sufficient but not necessary
• From making trouble to provoking practice
• But not in the same sense as cooperative analysis
• Where technology is used to analyse the present -
  existing practice - and to elaborate new
  possibilities - future practice
• Same aim, but the problem is that no practices
  exist to analyse cooperatively

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Provoking non-existent practice
• Provoke
• 1. To annoy or infuriate someone, especially
  deliberately.
• 2. To incite or goad.
• 3. To rouse (someone's anger, etc).
• 4. To cause or bring about something.
• Etymology
• 1432 Middle English, from Old French provoquer,
  from Latin provocare, pro- forth vocare to
  call, to call forth
• Call forth
• To evoke elicit (future practice)

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Respecifying breaching experiments for IT
  research
• Creating technological performances
• Staging them in the wild, not in the lab
  under controlled conditions
• Studying the work to make the technology work
• Explicating the ad hoc practices devised in situ
  by participants to make the technology work
• Provoking practice, calling it forth (bringing it
  about, causing it) and thereby making visible
  what the future turns upon in the here and now
• Propelling innovation

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Can You See Me Now?
• A mobile, mixed reality game
• Online players chased by runners on city streets
• Performance co-constructed by artists and IT
  researchers
• Research into new forms of interactive game and
  broader potential of GPS-based and mobile mixed
  reality computing to support collaboration

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Breaching Experiment Sheffield
• Global Positioning Systems are highly inaccurate
  (just bugs?)
• However, GPS inaccuracy was not a significant
  problem for the runners
• How come?

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Ad hoc practices locational work
• Runner 1 (on walkie-talkie) Ive taken a
  photograph of Sammy Boy.
• Runner 1 puts the camera back in his bag and
  then looks at the PDA.
• He changes his view on the PDA (from local to
  global) and looks to see who is where on the map.
• Runner 1 to other runners (on walkie-talkie)
  OK, Im going to see if I can come and help you
  with Jimbo (another player).
• Runner 1 to other runners (on walkie-talkie)
  See if you can get above Jimbo and drive him down
  towards the roundabout Ill try and cut him of
  at the roundabout.

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Locational work working knowledge of the
  technology
• Ethnographer So your tactics slow down, reel
  them in, and get them?
• Runner If theyre in a place that I know its
  really hard to catch them, I walk around a little
  bit and wait till theyre heading somewhere where
  I can catch them.
• Ethnographer Ambush!
• Runner Yeah, ambush.
• Ethnographer What defines a good place to catch
  them?
• Runner A big open space, with good GPS
  coverage, where you can get quick updates because
  then every move you make is updated when youre
  heading towards them because one of the problems
  is if youre running towards them and youre in a
  place where it slowly updates, you jump past
  them, and thats really frustrating.

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Locational work local knowledge of the physical
  environment
• Runner 1 (on walkie-talkie) I need a runner at
  the glowing mushrooms! I need a runner at the
  glowing mushrooms!
• Runner 2 (on walkie-talkie) Im thirty seconds
  away.
• Runner 1 (on walkie-talkie) I need another
  runner to meet me at the glowing mushroom.
• Runner 2 (on walkie-talkie) Im ten seconds
  away.
• Runner 1(on walkie-talkie) Where are you?
• Runner 2 (on walkie-talkie) Im going round to
  your right.
• Runner 1looks to his right and sees Runner 2.
• Runner 1 (on walkie-talkie) OK.

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Provoking practice and propelling innovation
• See CHI 04 and DIS 04 for full account of CYSMN
• Point here to show that practice can be called
  forth through conducting breaching experiments
• E.g., can see that what are often discounted as
  bugs is, from the point of view of interaction
  in the wild, a matter of skill and competence for
  users and consists of the in vivo development of
  collaborative practices for handling them
• Knowledge of those practices may, in turn, be
  used to propel innovation

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Ethnomethodology IT Research

• Summary
• Present and future
• Handling diversification explicating the
  ordinary work of alternate settings
• Particularly the ways in which technologies are
  used in the accomplishment of a settings
  routines
• Responding to rapid proliferation the absence of
  practice
• Developing a new interdisciplinary research
  method breaching experiments
• Constructing technological performances,
  deploying them in the wild, and explicating the
  work that makes the technology work - an aid to
  a sluggish imagination