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CHAPTER
9
Ethnography

9.1 INTRODUCTION
You've just been offered a fantastic opportunity to become involved in the design of
an innovative new health-care information management system, to be used in hos-
pital intensive-care units in a country that you've always wanted to visit. Your job is
to design an integrated set of user interfaces, based on a detailed understanding of
system requirements, organizational concerns, work practices, and a multitude of
other relevant factors.
As soon as you accept the job, you realize that you've got a big problem: where to
start? How should you go about developing an understanding of the situation that you
will need to design these interfaces? You've never worked in a hospital—let alone an
intensive-care unit—so you know almost nothing about how the people work, what
information they need, how they want it displayed, and other factors that will be
crucial elements of your designs.
This lack of background would be hard enough if the hospital was in your neigh-
borhood, as you might be able to rely upon shared cultural background and perhaps
even acquaintances to help you get started. However, you might find that the world
of the hospital workers is very unfamiliar. If you haven't worked in that environment,
the language, types of interactions, and values might effectively amount to a distinct
subculture. Tackling these questions in a foreign country, with different social norms
and work practices, seems much harder.
Whether in your home country or somewhere far from home, you should start by
realizing that differences between cultures can be very important. An understanding
of the ways that people work and interact is crucial for your success in designing the
tool: assuming that your users are “just like you” might be a recipe for failure. How
can you understand how people work and what they need from a computer system
when you have almost no understanding of the context in which your designs will
be used?
You might start by considering some of the other research techniques described
in this book. Your first thought might be to consider surveying potential users. A sur-
vey containing questions about reactions to current information systems and hopes
for future versions might help you build some initial understanding. Unfortunately,
there are problems with this approach: not only do you not have much idea of which
questions you should ask, you don't have much of an idea of how to ask them. You're

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