Demystifying the concept of ethnography

Ethnography is a naturalistic observational method that emphasizes the detailed observation of people in a naturally occurring setting. 

An ethnographic approach in Human Centered Interaction originates from social anthropology. Social anthropology is a study of human societies and cultures. 

So, what does it really mean? 

In a nutshell, studying the targeted group of people and their culture! 

Who are these people?
What is their profession?
How do they spend their day?
What do they believe in?
What factors of society they most influenced by?
What language do they speak? Etc. 

Questions like these breaks down the concept of ‘the study of people and cultures’. 

And data derived from studying these questions can be used to design better solutions to the wicked problems.

For example, in India, one needs to understand and study the different regional groups, their languages, their cultures, the society they live in, etc., in order to create a product or a service for them. 

e.g. Zee uses different logos with regional languages for the different region in India. 



Why Ethnography? 


Good ethnography helps you smell the culture and really understand it.

– Jo Yung 

Many times, in different User research techniques, we face blind spots. 

One on one interviews or surveys or even focus groups-recollections of memories or data do not align with the actual facts. Also, more than often, the actual setting of end users can’t be imaginable but discoverable. The details that are not just ‘thought of’ but ‘found’ has more credibility to the research which helps achieve the main goal i.e. to a design the better solution to the problem. 

For example- 

World Health Organization 

The World Health Organization’s use of ethnography, to understand sexual health issues and use of contraception among young women in India, led to the observation that the grandmother was the person in the influencer group of young women that decided what was taboo or stigmatized. The focus of the WHO’s training on sexual health was then placed not on the daughters or granddaughters in the family group but the matriarchs, the grandmothers. 

The intention of ethnography is to see the activity of the user in their natural environment with different techniques and by blending into them in order to extract the real qualitative data from the research and then convert it in the quantitative data in order to use it for the solution. 

Demystifying the concept of Design Ethnography. 


Design Ethnography is a form of applied Anthropology which uses various methods of qualitative data collection to develop new products or services as well as find better solutions to existing problems. 

As, Margaret Mead, the world-renowned anthropologist, famously said 

What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things. 

The purpose of using ethnography in design as a research tool is to put yourself in the shoes of those you’re observing and walk an extra mile while getting into their heads, understand their perspective and expectations and accurately record and share the gained knowledge in an objective way that you can later use to support design decisions/solutions down the track. 

Ethnography in design. 


The concept of Ethnography in design was conceived as a research method. This research method brought the researcher into fields-into real-life environments of the targeted user. This method helps researcher observe user in their natural environments. 

The desire to focus on the people to find better solutions using design has been encouraged by an increased interest in social sciences by designers. 

“Designing the future is by definition designing for the unknown. Nevertheless, and as we all know, educated guesses are better than uneducated guesses. In each instance, our tools, methods and procedures are intended to reduce the uncertainties associated with design.” 

-Richard Harper 

Since HCI (human Centered Interaction) is a process that starts with people that you’re designing for, ethnography teaches us a great deal about people and communities. 

In Human-centered Design, technology is both intellectual and social. The true power of ethnography is in its exploration of social, cultural, organizational influences that guide the views and decisions made by humans. 

Ethnography is a social equivalent of usability testing. 

By Rutuja Sanjay / Nov 22, 2018 / 10 min read

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