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This paper proposes a course for ethnography in design that problematizes the implied authenticity of “people out there,” and rather favors a performative worldview where people, things and business opportunities are continuously and reciprocally in the making, and where anthropological analysis is only one competence among others relevant for understanding how this making unfolds. In contrast to perpetuating the “real people” discourse that often masks the analytic work of the anthropologist relegating the role of the ethnographer to that of data collector (Nafus and Anderson 2006), this paper advocates a performative ethnography that relocates the inescapable creative aspects of analysis from the anthropologist’s solitary working office into a collaborative project space. The authors have explored the use of video clips, descriptions and quotes detached from their “real” context, not to claim how it really is out there, but to subject them to a range of diverse competencies, each with different interests in making sense of them. Hereby the realness of the ethnographic fragments lie as much in their ability to prompt meaningful re-interpretations here-and-now as in how precisely they correspond to the imagined real world out there-and-then. We propose that it is precisely the investment of one self and one’s own desires and agendas that lifts an ethnographic field inquiry out of its everydayness and into something of value to further-reaching processes of change and development of attractive alternatives.
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INTRODUCTION
In a recent paper, Nafus and Anderson (2006) explored the discourse of “the real people” as an important feature of the epistemic culture of ethnography in industry. They discuss the canonical use of ethnographic photographs and quotations from the field as powerful means of trumping even insightful argumentation, because they purportedly state the realness of the presented ethnographic argument in indisputable terms; in terms of the real: these people are really out there. Situated themselves among engineers, business strategists, and management experts, Nafus and Anderson acknowledge how important the “real people” discourse has been for strategically positioning ethnography as a relevant competence in industry (2006:3). It positions the professionally trained ethnographer as someone who can provide access to the hinterlands of the real people, where products are actually used in authentic everyday life, in ways the client would never have imagined. The problem with this discourse (besides that it does not correspond with the epistemological assumptions of many ethnographers, who are usually reluctant to refer to “the real” without the quotation marks, and who usually consider themselves and their clients as real as their informants) is that it leaves the analytical work of the ethnographer invisible, and thereby making ethnography look like mere data collection.
Already in 1994 Robert Anderson from the Rank Xerox Research Center in Cambridge responded to the ongoing discussions about the value of ethnography in systems design. He argued that many in the systems world have seen ethnography only as “information gathering and have missed the critical importance of representation” (Anderson 1994:160). While getting to know users and their knowledge and practices are important tasks for design, “you do not need ethnography to do that; just minimal competency in interactive skills and, a willingness to spend time, and a fair amount of patience” (Anderson 1994:155).
Both of these papers, written ten years apart, raise the question of whether the ‘real people’ refrain, and the representationalist knowledge practices it prefigures, will continue to characterize ethnography in industry. Like all three of these authors, we believe there is more value to be drawn from anthropology than data collection. In the present paper, we therefore take the invitation to chart an alternative path than that of exaggerating the real people refrain. We propose a course for ethnography in design that problematizes the implied authenticity of “people out there,” and rather favors a performative worldview where people, things and business opportunities are continuously and reciprocally in the making, and where anthropological analysis is only one competence among others relevant for understanding how this making unfolds.
Our experiences are drawn from research and design projects in collaboration with partners in industry and public institutions. They include ethnographic engagements with the fields of interaction design, system development, architecture, education, and public policy, and generally belong to design-oriented areas of industry. The projects have been carried out in the Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design and accordingly our ethnographic engagement with users has aimed more at eliciting their active participation in the projects, than at generating knowledge about them, as objects of study.
Let us start out somewhat paradigmatic: we believe the world is in a continual process of becoming through our engagement with it, and the user is not authentically “out there” to be discovered independently of our interest in the discovery. The user emerges somewhere in the meeting between our ethnographic search for “real people,” the practice of the particular participants in our study, and the projected interest in them posed by project stakeholders as possible new areas of use.
When Nafus and Anderson claim that “…the stand-alone quote is in fact the truth that conceals that there is none. It points to a seemingly external context that is being constructed inside the corporate meeting room,” (2006:11) we could not agree more. However, this creative work of imagination and construction that goes on in the corporate meeting room when clients are confronted with fragments of the surprising and strange ways of the users need not be read as a regrettable delusion. The world-constructing practice that can be prompted by an ethnographic stand-alone quote, image or video clip that point outside the meeting room is precisely what we are after. It has not led us to reduce our use of these rhetoric devices that purportedly connect us to the “real world”. In fact, we work out of a research tradition that excels in stand-alone quotations and context-free video clips (e.g. Buur and Søndergaard 2000). Let us explain and demonstrate how techniques that are widely used to establish the ethnographer’s authority of knowing what is “really out there”, can be used in more playful performances of realities in the plural.
Rather than lament that the anthropological analysis is bracketed off in the excitement over quotes and images, we propose a performative ethnography in design that relocates the inescapable creative aspects of analysis from the anthropologist’s solitary working office into a collaborative project space. We have used video clips, descriptions and quotes detached from their “real” context, not to claim how it really is out there, but to subject them to a range of diverse competencies, each with different interests in making sense of them. Hereby the realness of the ethnographic fragments lie as much in their ability to prompt meaningful re-interpretations here-and-now as in how precisely they correspond to the imagined real world out there-and-then.
The motivation for this paper and the work that lies behind it is a reaction against overly realist ideas of what ethnography may do in industry. To explore how performativity may provide us an alternative path from the “real people” refrain, we will begin with clarifying what kinds of performativity we are concerned with, and then proceed to present two particular examples of performative ethnographic practices in design.
TWO STRANDS OF PERFORMATIVITY
In distancing our ethnographic practice from providing the facts, or acting as truth witnesses for example in design negotiations whether or not a specific product feature is relevant for the real user, we will follow two strands of performativity: first, a broad performative ontology to conceptualize the practice we as ethnographers inquire into as an ever-evolving and unsettled becoming that resists reification in, for example, personas or segments; and second, performance theory from the performing arts to better understand the social interactions that are involved in playful explorations of how the world could be thought of when ethnographic material is presented to industrial audiences with diverse interests.
Ontological Performativity
Looking at performativity in the broadest sense of the word implies that everything continually comes into being through its social and material performance. Such a perspective is employed to capture the process whereby phenomena are produced or reproduced through their particular performance. In How To Do Things with Words (1962) John Austin presented the concept of the performative utterance. It was a reaction to the logical positivist focus on the truthfulness and verifiability of statements. As a category of utterances without truth-value, the performative does not describe but acts on the world, hence the title of the book. In other words, by the utterance of the word, the act is performed. Austin also launched the more encompassing idea that all utterances are in fact performative: they dosomething.
Since Austin’s pioneering work with performative utterances, post-structuralism has given rise to fundamental questions to the distinction of categories, beyond linguistics. Movements in science and technology studies, actor-network theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology have developed a general analytical understanding that distinctions are not given in the order of things, but rather seen as outcomes or effects. With the notion of relational ontologies, the fundamentally semiotic insight that entities take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other entities is applied to anything. In light of the notion of performativity, the discussion of what is really out there is abandoned in favor of a discussion of how things continually become what they are in and through their performed relations with other things. Since entities have no inherent qualities, the question is how, then, do things become what they are?
Performative ontology, i.e., that things become what they are through their performance, has been developed especially within Science and Technology Studies. Pickering, for example, suggested a “performative idiom” for the study of scientific practice (1995) and thereby articulated a new attention to the production of scientific facts. Similarly to what the performative idiom has done to understand the production of scientific facts, we suggest can be done to understand the production of designerly facts such as “the users and their practice” or “the client and their resources.” These are entities that appear very real, yet they come into being through meticulous processes of performance. From within feminist theory, Butler has shown how gender works as a performative—constituting the act that it purportedly describes (1997). While Butler focused on the repetitive nature of gender performances, here we are more concerned with the possibility of actively inducing change as an emergence among actors.
The post-structuralist preoccupation with how things continually become what they are suggests the transformative power of performance. An important consequence of performativity is “that everything is uncertain and reversible, at least in principle” (Law 1999:4). While it has been demonstrated many times that it matters how things become as they are performed, it is still an open question how this insight may be brought to bear on our understanding and practice of ethnography in design. Could we improve the efficacy of the design process by conceiving of it as a performance? What resources do we as ethnographers have available to perform the social and technological interactions of the future? With these questions we take ontological performativity to be valuable not only as a means to analytically understand ethnographically experienced practice, but just as importantly as a relevant contribution to a reflexive design anthropological practice. To pro-actively embrace the idea that everything in principle is uncertain and reversible implies, in terms of ethnography in design, encouragement to consider the design process as a conscious effort to enact particular modes of reality and people’s concerns about them.
The relational ontologies of use and design imply that the one does not come before the other; rather, they necessarily constitute each other. There is nothing paradoxical in exploring the possibilities of use through the practice of design. It is impossible to think about design without already implying some sort of use, and vice versa. This prompts us as design oriented anthropologists to create opportunities where use practices can be performed differently; where they can be explored in terms of design possibilities, and vice versa.
Confined Dramaturgical Performativity
The anthropology of performance has to a large extent evolved from the study of rituals and symbols. Let us begin with ritual as it has been anthropologically conceived. As early as 1909, Van Gennep published his classic study of Rites of Passage (Gennep 1960), i.e. ritualized changes of social or cultural state, as for example becoming human, becoming adult or becoming married. Van Gennep described the general structure of initiation rites as following three ritual stages: that of separation (the person to be initiated is detached from society), that of transition or liminality (the state of the person is ambiguous while approaching the new state and having left the old) and that of reincorporation (the person is re-introduced to society in the new state). Victor Turner later expanded these ideas, focusing especially on the liminal period, which he also identified in other types of rituals than rites of passage. He was concerned with the transition as a process, as a becoming and transformation. One of Turner’s central points was that the ritual suspension of normal order is a necessary step for achieving the desired changes of state. Turner described the temporary liminal state of the indefinable transitional being as “betwixt and between,” in the sense that it is at once no longer classified (for example as a boy) and not yet classified (as a man) (Turner 1996).
The borderline between the anthropology of ritual and performance theory has since been famously traveled and conceptualized by Richard Schechner in part fueled by Turner. Schechner used insights from the analysis of ritual to experiment with actual dramaturgical performances and thereby challenged and developed the established notions of stage, actor, script and audience. Of particular interest here, are Schechners observations of how the act of performing can transform both the actor and the audience. The act does not simply represent another mode of reality; it plays with modes of reality. Through various techniques for setting the scene, prompting improvisation, and for inviting audience participation, Schechner has been a major influence on both the theory and practice of the performing arts.