We have had some neat speakers in the past two week. On Tuesday November 14, we featured Senior Researcher, Taina Raijanti. Dr. Raijanti spoke on the topic of What is ethnography? Below are my notes from her lecture…

What is ethnography?
By Taina Rajanti

Anthropology is concerned with how culture happens in everyday life. Why do we need ethnographic data?

In social science, ethnographic data is the simples form of data: something you get by simple observation. Whether it is looking at it yourself or simply asking people, or taking pictures, etc. But the whole point is What are you going to do with it? Ex: What do people think about the Nokia 6300? What does the Nokia 63 series makes them feel like?

Ethnography is so simple that it does not make sense to say that you should do it in a particular way. Still, you need to have some very basic information so that you can weight your claims…

First of all, you need a theoretical framework… The you need to get your data… And then you need to reflect on how you are going to use it…

Why is the theoretical framework there in the beginning? It frames what you ask and what you get from the data. It supplies a scheme, a structure. You will not see anything in the data unless you have something else in your “head” before.

The objectiveness of doing research comes from the rules that you use or follow when you are doing the research. This is why you have to have concepts.

A concept is not a thing or a word: It is about trying to look at something in a context. (And Not by Itself.) A Concept puts thing in a Context and as a Whole: It has a Logic, a Dynamic, and a Structure. A Concept puts Things into a Context.

What happens when we look at concepts rather than the phenomenon itself. Here is an example: Socialization. This is a concept that seeks to explain that you learn to behave according to your social position. So you look at what is happening and you record.

Bruno Latour in Science in the Making speaks about Actant: An actor who does not get to speak for himself or herself. How does this get reified?

[Lily] “Is this similar to the concept of Subaltern in Post-Colonial theory?”
[Taina] There are similarities.

Concept is a scientific way of looking at things. You need the concept and the conceptual frame to be able to see the phenomenon. It is needed for when you are going to manipulate the data.

What is it that you look for? It is the everyday concepts… the meanings. Things exist for people if they are meaningful.

You need to find out what is meaningful for people and why? Meanings are everyday concepts.
In doing research, the first thing to do is ask is Why do I want to do this? What do I want to find out? Ask the same question after you have brought your data. Doing research is about finding your own basic difference. And about finding out about what is relevant or irrelevant.

On ethnographic research: Why should designers be concerned with ethnographic research? Because you can find out what people are thinking and then you can also get them involved in the process of design.

Ethnographic research is needed when you need to find out about people’s meanings. These cannot be constructed from statistics, for example. The context is important.