While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as le...

In order to harness the value of workplace ethnography, it is becoming more and more apparent that we need a way to incorporate ethnographic data into work system analysis and design efforts. One of the biggest problems we face in this regard is making the best use of the insights that ethnography brings to a design process. Traditionally ethnography takes a lot of time, is done mostly in isola...

BACKGROUND Syntheses of qualitative studies can inform health policy, services and our understanding of patient experience. Meta-ethnography is a systematic seven-phase interpretive qualitative synthesis approach well-suited to producing new theories and conceptual models. However, there are concerns about the quality of meta-ethnography reporting, particularly the analysis and synthesis proces...

We consider the role of ‘workplace studies’ in design and specifically, what it means to use ethnography to ‘inform’ design. We suggest that there is a need for a foundational change in the configuration of the practical relationship between ethnography and design if the approach is to be of lasting utility: from the traditional product-oriented configuration where ethnography attempts to infor...

Ethnography has been introduced into technology design lifecycles to help sensitise new technologies to the work practices of their intended users. This paper reports on how ethnography was used in parallel to technology prototyping in the design of a workflow system to improve accuracy and efficiency in banking in India. Unlike previously largely positive reports of how ethnography helps to sh...