Fieldwork for Design

Gary Marsden, Associate Professor of HCl, University of Cape Town, South Africa Dave Randall is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Richard Harper is a Senior Researcher for Microsoft Mark Rouncefield is a Senior Research Fellow at Lancaster University

• Ethnography, Fieldwork, and Design: Preliminary Remarks.- Ethnography, Fieldwork, and Design: Preliminary Remarks.- Theoretical and Analytic Issues.- The State of Play.- Some Perspectives.- Activity Theory, Distributed Cognition, and Actor-Network Theory.- Methods for Social Investigation: Practical Issues.- Ethnography and Its Role in the Design Process - “If You Must Work Together'.- Ethnography and How to Do It.- Analytic Issues: What Have We Got?.- Common sense and Context.- Organisations and Work.- Into the Home.- Conclusion: Not the Last Word.

"As an HCI researcher and practitioner, I am delighted to see, at last, a balanced view about the practice of ethnography within our field. This book presents an informative balance between the theory and practice of fieldwork methods, allowing researchers to conduct trials with confidence and understand the scope of the results that can be gained from these trials.At last, some of the most per-eminent people in their field show computer scientists and HCI researchers that it is valid to use ethnographic techniques without doing "proper" Sociology and Anthropology."Professor Gary Marsden, professor of HCI, University of Cape Town, South Africa