ethnography and system design

I found these two quotes from Ian Sommerville a very good summary of what I also think about importance of ethnography in design:

“Software systems do not exist in isolation. They are used in a social and organisational context” and “how the social and organisational context affects the practical operation of the system.”

this point to the “sensitising” role of ethnography:

“sensitising you to the nature of work and its organisation ”(Tom Rodden)

and

“You get information about the social interactions in the setting, which other design and analysis methods simply don’t capture.” (Ian Sommerville)

and

“I think the most important thing in ethnography is simply getting designers sensitive to the issues that the people who use systems confront. ” (Dave Randall)

The second point which is also interesting was what Richard Bentley said about looking for new ideas, new developments and new solutions. It may even happen that when we look closer to the context and actual setting and workflow we may find out that our original questions and problem definition that we are designing for, is wrong or need a serious revise.

“ethnography is a very good way of finding out some interesting things that might be worthy of further exploration or of changing your view.”(Steve Benford)

The third point that I found relevant was the use of ethnographical study to understand which parts are essential to remain and which parts are dictated with limitations of existing tool.

“what things are non-critical and the consequences of the environment they are in at the moment?”(Richard Bentley)

the forth point is the use if ethnographical studies evaluatively

“at each stage, to learn about how people experience them and feed that back into design. Ethnography is, I think, a highly appropriate and relatively quick way of doing that. ”(Steve Benford)

I also somehow disagree with Richard Harper when he says “I think if you’re doing ethnography it seems intrinsic to observation and grasping and feeling inside the worlds of those that you’re studying that you get a sense of how those worlds are assembled and thus you therefore also have a sense of how it can be reassembled.” I think when you study something you gain some information, and what you would later do with that information is up to you. It seems engineering kind of thinking that you go from “how something works” to “how it can work or be reassembled differently”.