Introduction
In this chapter, I present the methodological approach I have developed for studying the multiple enactment of users during user-centered design practices at a microprocessor corporation. The chapter is structured as follows: I begin by introducing the organizational setting that was my field site and my informants in order to ground my empirical work. I then discuss the key principles for conducting an ethnographic study of designers as they work with users as part of routine user-centered design processes. In so doing, I identify correspondences between Steve Woolgar and Madeleine Akrich’s ethnographic studies of users. I draw out a set of key methodological assumptions for following designers’ practice and studying the local enactment of users encountered as multiple, heterogeneous and emergent. Finally, I present a detailed description of my fieldwork and analytic methods, including participant observation, document analysis, photography and ethnographic interviews. Here, I discuss the methodological issues and challenges I faced in participating in and studying designers’
practices and modes of user involvement conducted within a corporate context.
Studying User-Centered Design
In this section I describe the organizational setting for my fieldwork. I begin by introducing the corporation and then discuss the role of the User-Centered Design Group (henceforth UCDG) within the organization. Given the size and geographic extent of the corporation and its dominance as an ICT manufacturer, I will sketch out its corporate structure in order to situate my informants and field site within this context.
The corporation in which I conducted my fieldwork is a leading multinational microprocessor manufacturer in the computing industry. As such, it is a commercial organization that pursues the research, development, production, marketing and standardisation of microprocessors, as well as various ICT technologies associated with semiconductors and microprocessors. The corporation employs approximately 100,000 personnel in over 200 facilities worldwide. The organisation’s headquarters are located in California, however, its biggest concentration of facilities and employees lies in the Pacific
Northwest of the U.S.A., in an area dubbed the ‘Silicon Forest’.35 It was here that I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork over the course of a six-month internship with the corporation. In addition to the development, manufacturing and retail of silicon microprocessors, the corporation is also engaged in the research and development of various technologies associated with computing architecture, including embedded processors, motherboard chipsets, integrated circuit boards, flash memory, graphics chipsets, as well as networking and communication technologies. As part of these efforts the corporation is also active in various national and international ICT standards initiatives, for example the worldwide consortia of semiconductor manufacturers SEMATECH, which works to establish and maintain public and commercial research agendas and interoperability between different hardware and software components, entailing co-operation between government and ICT manufacturers.
In 2005, and in part due to adverse economic conditions, the corporation was re-structured into a number of divisions formed to address different microprocessor and chipset markets and emerging market opportunities. The restructuring was communicated within the corporation as an efficiency drive and as a strategic re-orientation to a user-centered approach to the design and development of technology, broadly speaking. Not to be confused with UCD, the corporation’s user-centered approach concerned the corporation’s ‘core’ business of developing competitive silicon microprocessor technologies. Rather than Moore’s Law being viewed as the principal model for strategic semiconductor development (Schaller, 1997;
Miller & O'Leary, 2007), the user-centered approach, at the corporate level, equated to developing and delivering technologies that are were seen to respond to customer and market demands.36 One example of this is the increasing emphasis placed on delivering increased energy efficiency of computing microarchitecture (Koomey et al., 2009). The corporation was, at the time of my fieldwork, organised into the following divisions, including: business computing, home computing, health and medical computing, mobile and embedded computing and a group addressing emerging geographical markets. Organisationally, UCDG was part of the business-computing division, which developed computing platforms to support the market for chipsets in business such as desktop computers, workstations, servers, storage technologies and related software. Primarily, this division was engaged in almost all aspects of motherboard production ensuring compatibility with, and market readiness for, the corporation’s chipsets. Although the operating income and net revenue of the group had decreased significantly over the period of three years (2004 – 2006), the group’s activities
35 See (Dodds & Wollner, 1990) for a historical account of the Portland area as a centre for microprocessor industries.
36 For a discussion of the role of Moore’s Law as an economic ‘mediating instrument’ that links together multiple actors in envisioning of future markets in the microprocessor industry see (Miller & Oleary, 2007). For a history of semiconductors and microprocessors see (Braun & Macdonald, 1982; Mowery et al., 1998). For an example of the role of expectations in shaping the activities of microprocessor development see (van Lente, 1993: 10).
were viewed as essential to ensuring the uptake of new microprocessors, the success of which is largely dependent on the availability of compatible chipsets and motherboards.
Within the broader corporate context, UCDG was a relatively small operation. At the time of my fieldwork it consisted of fifty employees and two interns, including myself. The group was internally structured into different areas of expertise, including: human factors, engineering and usage requirements, design research, software and hardware development and engineering, user interaction design and industrial design, user experience evaluation, mechanical engineering, administration and operations, as well as a remote employee in India tasked with setting up a UCDG to engage with emerging markets in Southern Asia. The role of the UCDG within the organization was twofold. Primarily, it was tasked with supporting the activities of the business-computing group by producing reference designs for computer casings and enclosures. Furthermore, UCDG also acted as a resource for the application of user-centered design principles and practices to innovation activities across the corporation.
In this way the group was viewed as a general strategic resource to aid the management of innovation within the corporation, including the translation of the ‘social’ into the design and production of microprocessors and computer hardware. According to key members in UCDG, this meant understanding how peoples’ everyday computing ‘needs’ and market opportunities can inform the conception, design and development of new ICT technologies – as a principal member of the UCDG and a leading strategist within the corporation put it:
“It's essentially user-centered innovation process. It's how do you go from either starting from a rough market opportunity you want to pursue, which is typically where you start;
or, an observation or an insight about human beings and some social context or physical context – how you systematically translate and transform that into something that [the corporation] recognises as essentially a technical requirement, like a workload. We need this number of bits flowing across this bus from here to there. How do you relate this high level thing about people wanting something or desiring something emotionally to something that you can measure with voltmeters?”37
Practically, and in the main, this involved the design of reference hardware specifications (computer casings and input output device such as mice and monitors) for the business-computing group, the writing of usage to requirement specifications, user research conducted by design researchers and innovation practices centered around the development of prototypes. To this end UCDG was also involved in ongoing activities with various other groups within the corporation. One example of this is how, during my fieldwork, the group collaborated with various other groups within the corporation, including its global network of research laboratories, the health and medical computing group, the home computing group
37 Interview with UCDG Innovation Strategist, August 9th 2006.
and the mobile computing group. Notably, such collaborations necessarily involved the application of UCD principles in the development of computing technologies. Such systems included an interactive device to support the early detection and onset of Alzheimer’s disease and a fully functional computer system targeted at Chinese families. In both cases UCDG collaborated with different divisions within the corporation, and partnered with outside organizations, such as a leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer care, support and research. The group also had an ongoing relationship with a small team of anthropologists and ethnographers also working for the corporation who were engaged in the strategic exploration of emerging microprocessor markets and usages. As a consequence, technologies and their associated user models and representations circulated amongst a variety of stakeholders and audiences within both the corporation and external organizations.38
Design in Action: Ethnography, Design and Users
How, then, can UCD be analysed as a practice that explicitly engages and involves users?
Moreover, how can the role of users be understood as part of an endeavour that prominently features material and visual practices? Indeed, how can the identity, form and contents of users be better understood?
Accounts of design have tended to address the historical development of aesthetic form (Fuller, 1988), the meaning of the designed artefact (Dunne, 1999), biographies of individual designers (e.g. Pevsner, 1960; Sparke, 2010), the social and cultural contexts and impacts of industrially produced artefacts (e.g. Papanek, 1970; Forty, 1986; Whiteley, 1993), or the theories and discourse of designers (e.g. Margolin, 1989a) in how they conceive and frame the meaning of design and the designed artefact. More recently, however, social scientists have begun to address design as practice, such as the practice of architectural design (Yaneva, 2005, 2009a, 2009b), industrial and product design (Molotch, 2003; Shove et al., 2007) and the culture of design in general (Julier, 2000). In the main, the recent attention to the practices and objects of design draws on SSK and STS, in which laboratory studies demonstrated the deployment of linguistic, material and representational resources in the construction of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this commitment to design as practice links up with the field of HCI and CSCW, discussed in the previous chapter, in which social theory has been variously employed to resource and account for the design and development of ICTs (Berg, 1998;
Suchman, 1999; Suchman, 2006).
38 I use the term ‘stakeholder’ with the assumption that interests are constituted rather than merely reflected within the process of innovation. Furthermore, the term stakeholder also points to the different social groups whose prospective interests can be resourced by users (cf. Brown et al., 2000a: 12).
As John Law (2004: 2) reminds us, ethnographic studies of scientific laboratories have demonstrated that scientific knowledge and objects are created in practice.39 Moreover, ethnographers of science have convincingly argued that such practices are material as well as discursive (e.g. Latour & Woolgar, 1986: 45; Latour, 1988b: 63). In light of laboratory studies and their legacy, it becomes apparent that to get closer to the role of users in UCD, the analyst of design must study the routine practices of designers in which users feature.
Following Rayner Banham’s call (1996: 299) for an anthropology of design where the design studio is acknowledged as the site in which the ‘inner workings’ of the tribe can be observed and understood, my methodological rationale was guided by the belief that the ‘black box’ of UCD, namely the user, can be better understood by participating in and observing how designers enact users in their everyday practices.40 As such, the object of this thesis is therefore the user, as it is variously occasioned during routine design practices. Moreover, the metaphor of the laboratory serves to enlighten how design practices can be locally studied in the workplace set amidst the corporation.
Accordingly, the methodological rationale that I have developed for this study concerns following and tracing the various complex assemblages of practices, materials and discourse in and through which users are made to matter in design. That is to say, I follow Latour (1988b:
258), by studying designers and users in action: how users emerge, become stable and circulate amongst various innovation actors, stakeholders and audiences within and beyond the corporation. Further, and given STS’s emphasis on controversy (e.g. MacKenzie, 1990), closure (Pinch & Bijker, 1987; Bijker, 1999) and failure (Callon, 1986a; Latour, 1996), my tracing of users also pays attention to how users do not succeed in design practice – for example how non-users are defined or how particular user representations are discarded.
This, then, implies that in practice users are multiple and fluid, and points to the multi-functionality of users as they operate in relation to designed objects, the practices and beliefs of designers and the wider dynamics of technological development within the corporation. As such, users not only resource the scripting and configuring of technological artefacts but also function in various related innovation activities: for example, and by way of preview, users are employed to warrant particular innovation practices and legitimate technological decisions taken by designers; users feature in the communication of new technologies to colleagues, management, expert peer groups and publics; users feature in accounts of end-use that serve
39 For ethnographic studies of scientific laboratories see (Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Lynch, 1985; Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Pinch, 1986; Traweek, 1988; Forsythe & Hess, 2001). For overviews of laboratory studies see (Pickering, 1992; Sismondo, 2003, pp. 86-96; Doing, 2008).
40 The notion of the black box (Latour, 1988b: 2; 1999b: 304), derived from cybernetics, is a key term within ANT and refers to a technical object or process, broadly defined, the contents of which are taken for granted whilst the object or process works. As such, only its inputs and outputs need attention and the transformation and mediations effected by the black box remain opaque.
Whenever the object breaks or fails its complex inner workings suddenly become problematised and open to scrutiny. Harman (2009: 34) argues that the term is central to Latour’s view of the composition of material actors in general in that they are alliances or assemblies of associations between entities that act as a singular unit.
to mobilise management, as well as existing and potential technology partners, in support of sociotechnical visions; users are employed to resource designers’ and innovation actors individual career paths and professional agendas; accounts of users serve to mediate the work of corporate researchers to scholarly audiences; and finally, users are also deployed to support arguments concerning the use of design and the importance of the ‘social’ within a corporate setting conditioned by the logic of Moore’s Law. Accordingly, to apprehend and trace the various forms, competencies and roles of users in design practice, it is necessary to broaden the notion of the user to include more than simply users as embodied persons. That is to say, users can also be analytically traced in representations and usages embodied within artefacts, in the discursive deployment of rhetorical figures and in the complexes of data and knowledge that inform and support design practice.
As laboratory studies have demonstrated, the most suitable method for studying material and visual practice is ethnography. Following Law (2004: 41) an STS approach to ethnography amounts to a ‘method assemblage’ in which the empirical is actively constituted out of additions and relations between bodies, objects, practices and words. As Hess notes (2009: 239), STS ethnographies involve the collection of multiple forms of data sourced from various points of contact within the field. This, I will argue, enabled me to study the various involvements of users during the routine synthetic practices of designers, something the history and discourse of design has had little to say about. In this context, Hamersley and Atkinson supply a basic description of the ethnographic method:
[Ethnography is] a particular method or set of methods which in its most characteristic form … involves the ethnographer participating overtly or covertly in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research (1995: 1).
Further to this, Annemarie Mol points to the utility of ethnography as a methodological instrument for studying users, in which the ethnographer must be attentive to the synthesis and ordering of heterogeneous elements involved in socio-material practices:
“The ethnographic study of practices does not search for knowledge in subjects who have it in their minds and may talk about it. Instead, it locates knowledge primarily in activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures and so on. Objects, in their turn, are not taken here as entities waiting out there to be represented but neither are they the constructions shaped by subject-knowers.” (Mol, 2003: 32)
Given that UCD, as described in the previous chapter, is a commitment to the practical application of the principles of user involvement, ethnography – a method calibrated to understanding practice – is the most applicable research method. Moreover, an STS approach to ethnography, which foregrounds the socio-material practices of interdisciplinary
innovation actors, is well suited to the study of design in action and the multiplicity of users enacted therein.
Some Principles for Following Designers and Tracing Users
For this thesis, the correspondences between Woolgar’s (1991a) and Akrich’s (1992b, 1992a, 1995) ethnographies of users, discussed in the literature review, serve to highlight the key methodological principles for studying users in design practice.41 However, in contrast to Woolgar and Akrich’s studies in which putative users are encoded into technical objects as protocols to be negotiated during end-use, I am concerned with how designers variously employ users as a local resource during design processes. Consequently, I am not exclusively concerned with the mutual shaping of technology and users, but rather the flexibility and multiple roles of users as they come into being and are deployed in design practice.
Nonetheless, both Akrich and Woolgar provide important methodological premises, and point to the advantages of an ANT informed methodology.
The first parallel I want to draw attention to in the work of Woolgar and Akrich concerns the identity of users. Woolgar, for example, shows how users are encountered in a variety of forms, including test-users (1991a: 81) and rhetorical figures within the everyday conversations of engineers (ibid.: 73) and marketers (ibid.: 70). Similarly, Akrich (1992a: 174) argues that users have ‘varying definitions’ that come into view during different stages of innovation. Furthermore, both Akrich (1995: 168) and Woolgar (1991a: 89) view material objects as the semiotic embodiment of putative users. Practically, this insight implies that in following designers the analyst does not make the a-priori assumption that users only exist as human-users. Rather, the analyst must remain impartial ‘as to the various actors we follow’
(Latour, 1988b: 258). Accordingly, in following designers and tracing the involvement of users one must pay attention to the heterogeneity of entities and actors that participate in the design process, including, but not limited to: personas, prototypes, research papers, microchips, user-requirement models, presentations and publicity material.
The second parallel concerns how users take their form and acquire their attributes by virtue of their relations to other entities: in other words, the heterogeneous composition of users. On this score, Woolgar (1991a: 70) recognises that users require spokespersons – experts who speak on their behalf – which implies that users are not discrete actors but are, in practice, distributed across material and discursive processes. In short, their identity and composition is an upshot of the associations between entities. Likewise, Akrich (1992b: 222) argues that in order to understand users the ethnographer must pay attention to the reciprocal relations between an artefact and its users. In her view (ibid.: 205), technical objects are
41 Arguably, these principles, most notably impartiality and symmetry, are derived from Bloor’s four tenets for the sociology of scientific knowledge (Hess, 2009: 235).
composites of heterogeneous elements. Further, Akrich (ibid.: 206) asserts that users are
composites of heterogeneous elements. Further, Akrich (ibid.: 206) asserts that users are