Peter Tolmie – författare

Ethnography is now a fundamental feature of design practice, taught in universities worldwide and practiced widely in commerce. Despite its rise to prominence a great many competing perspectives exist and there are few practical texts to support the development of competence. Doing Design Ethnography elaborates the ethnomethodological perspective on ethnography, a distinctive approach that provides canonical ''studies of work'' in and for design. It provides an extensive treatment of the approach, with a particular slant on providing a pedagogical text that will support the development of competence for students, career researchers and design practitioners. It is organised around a complementary series of self-contained chapters, each of which address key features of doing the job of ethnography for purposes of system design. The book will be of broad appeal to students and practitioners in HCI, CSCW and software engineering, providing valuable insights as to how to conduct ethnography and relate it to design.

This edited collection brings together a range of experiences from the field, largely in the context of CSCW and HCI. It focuses specifically on the experiences of people who have worked in difficult, tense, delicate and sometimes conflictual and dangerous settings. The tensions faced by researchers and, more importantly, how they manage to deal with them are often under-remarked. Unlike the bulk of published ethnographic work, the chapters in this book deal more explicitly with the various practical problems that researchers with varying degrees of experience face.

Our aim in this book is to give a voice to researchers who have sometimes contended with unexpected issues and who sometimes have had to face them on their own. We explore incidents which may entail emotional conflict, embarrassment and shame, feelings of isolation, arguments with other members of a team, political pressures, and ideological confusions, to name but a few.  Senior figures in research laboratories and elsewhere may provide intellectual direction and support but may not always recognise the personal and problematic nature of qualitative enquiry undertaken by relatively inexperienced researchers. The chapters examine feelings of isolation, the difficulty of ‘taking sides’, the negotiation of personal, ethical, and political pressures in the field, and dealing with conflicting visions of what the research should be about.

The book is a resource for those embarking on the challenges of working in unfamiliar or difficult settings and moreover should act as a reminder to academics who might have forgotten the practical issues that researchers can face and how they deal with them. 

This book is about the impact of the ''Icon Age'' on people''s collecting practices. The Icon Age is when objects began to be represented on computer screens via icons. It focuses on how the Icon Age has affected how people do things associated with collections, from their inception to their disposal and everything in-between. It also looks at different kinds of collections and how they are managed across seven key collecting contexts: accumulations; libraries; filing-systems; archives; museums and galleries; private collections; and amateur collections. To inform this, studies were undertaken of how collecting was done across a range of diverse collections. The book also presents a taxonomy of collectable object types, including new types of objects that have appeared since the onset of the Icon Age. The book draws out important lessons regarding the impact of IT on collecting practices and contexts. It also suggests that, where contexts use digital practices, these exhibit an increasing level of conformity. The book concludes by looking beyond the Icon Age to the potential impact on collecting of new kinds of computing technology.

This book aims to deconstruct ethnography to alert systems designers, and other stakeholders, to the issues presented by new approaches that move beyond the studies of ‘work’ and ‘work practice’ within the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology). The theoretical and methodological apparatus of the social sciences distort the social and cultural world as lived in and understood by ordinary members, whose common-sense understandings shape the actual milieu into which systems are placed and used.

In Deconstructing Ethnography the authors show how ‘new’ calls are returning systems design to ‘old’ and problematic ways of understanding the social. They argue that systems design can be appropriately grounded in the social through the ordinary methods that members use to order their actions and interactions.

This work is written for post-graduate students and researchers alike, as well as design practitioners who have an interest in bringing the social to bear on design in a systematic rather than a piecemeal way. This is not a ‘how to’ book, but instead elaborates the foundations upon which the social can be systematically built into the design of ubiquitous and interactive systems.