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Representations and Requirements: The Value of Ethnography in System Design

For a number of reasons, systems designers have recently shown considerable interest in ethnography. For the most part, this has been used as a method for the specification of end-user requirements for systems. In this article, I argue that most of this interest is predicated in a misunderstanding of ethnography's role in social science. Instead of focusing on its analytic aspects, designers have defined it as a form of data collection. They have done this for very good, design-relevant reasons, but designers do not need ethnography to do what they wish to do. In the central part of this article, I introduce and illustrate an approach to analytic ethnography in human-computer interaction. In the latter sections I take this approach and show how it opens up the play of possibilities for design. These possibilities are illustrated by counterpoising a summary logic of organizational structure such as that associated with the calculus of efficiency and productivity with the local logics of daily organizational life.