Ethnographer, appreciate thyself

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." If one were to explicitly extend that idea to the community, one would have to question whether CSCW were behaving intelligently.

1. CSCW is (or wants to be) grounded in ethnographic work, in which
a) researchers try to understand people from the point of view of the people,
b) recognizing that although peoples' practices may appear non-sensical, they are rational from the practicioners' perspectives and should be honoured as such,
c) in order that (computer) tools and processes can be better designed to support those practices.

2. CSCW is (or wants to be) a (more) inter-disciplinary field in which learnings from research from different traditions may be mobilized to support work in others. (Note that this does not mean "multi-disciplinary", since CSCW is already great at bringing into the same building diverse people who ignore each other for entire week-long conferences.)

A question at a workshop highlighted the lack of non-trivial "design implications" produced by ethnographers through research. The suggestion, consult _designers_ when writing up so that /they/ can offer input about _design_ implications, is supported in various ways from literatures in communications studies, cross-cultural interaction, consumer marketing, social anthropology, political science, and others. Ethnographers responded:

a) We (ethnographers) can't write with designers. Designers dilute the appreciative part of doing ethnography.
b) We can't consider a different audience. We want to be in the designers' conversations.
c) We don't know any of the details of how those other fields approached the problem, but instead of asking about that, let's criticize them based on our assumptions about what they are about.
d) Those other fields solved this problem with different goals in mind. We can't reuse their knowledge.
e) You (communications person) have not personally convinced us of these alternative approaches. Therefore, those approaches are all wrong.
f) It's easier to find fault with new ideas than to find their merits. Let's focus on the faults and dismiss the merits.
g) You (potential user of ethnography-design research outputs) do not understand ethnography or design, so your input does not matter.
h) Every discipline resists ideas from other disciplines. Ethnographers in CSCW are justified in doing the same.
i) Although everyone concedes that this is one poor example of someone else's approach to the interdisciplinary problem, we must ignore the five other good examples in the list and the approach they support, because we want to invent our own way to be interdisciplinary.

Local reinvention is often useful in the course of adopting new practices. It's understandable that even a discipline (or ring of disciplines) whose premise is to understand and appreciate how and why people do things the way they do, might follow a similar path.

It's interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that ethnographers' main investigative attitude is so difficult to mobilize introspectively. That there is the blindspot of appreciating ethnographic work (and thence designing tools to support ethnographic work) is perhaps a good sign that there is some intelligence here.