Ethnographic Methods to Study Context: An Illustration

The ability to reflect contextual factors is crucial to the success of computerized support systems. Consequently, identifying how context affects the supported processes is a prerequisite for developing such systems, and ethnographic studies can play an important role in shaping system design. We are developing methods for supporting distributed collaborative troubleshooting by aiding the transmission of useful contextual information between participants, based on a study of contextual influences in the existing troubleshooting process. This extended abstract summarizes methods, motivations and observations from our socio-technical analysis, based on a nine-month naturalistic study of real-world remote diagnosis of electronic devices by ad hoc teams. It illustrates how ethnographic tools can be brought to bear for such analysis, as well as illustrating the richness of the real-world contexts that such an analysis can reveal.