Design Ethnography
What is Design Ethnography?
In Design we have been looking at the meaning of Design Ethnography and the tools in which we use to complete it.
Ethnography is fieldwork; observing people in their natural environment. Therefore, Design Ethnography is a method of understanding, what the designers do in order to know the experience people will have with the products or services they design. This is a very important part of design, as it gives you the opportunity to witness behavioral patterns and see beyond the preconceptions which they may have had previous to the research.
I found this very interesting, especially all the different methods. One of the most interesting was the Participant Observation. This is where you take part in the research, allowing you to experience the emotions and feelings the users will have when using the product or service.
Using this in the field.
We were then set the task of trying out some methods, one being Participant Observation. My group and I went to a food store on campus and took turn trying to use the service with a physical impairment. Such as restricted or lack of vision, others tried restricted use of limbs. This gave us the opportunity to understand what it is like for people with these impairments (not just watching them use the service), but actually experience what it is like ourselves. It allows you to have a greater level of empathy for the users, which as a designer is important when designing as we must consider all types of users. Having done this mini experiment, we developed it in a slightly different direction, this was when the workshop task was set.
Workshop task.
In the workshop we were set a task to look at an experience of a service on campus. As a group we looked at a milkshake bar, the brief asked us to make a short video showing the user experience. This required planning, and then the shoot of the video along with a bit of editing to make it interesting and engaging to watch. I think the most interesting thing about this project was not the execution, but watching what all the other groups had made and how different each video was. We all had the same brief, yet every single video was different. If you would like to watch some of the videos our teams produced the links are at the bottom.