“The most rudimentary behavior must  be determined both in relation to the real and present factors which condition it and in relation to a certain object, still to come, which it is trying to bring into being.  This is what we call the project.”

Sartre, Search for a method, 1963

Introduction
I know that it is customary in talks of this nature to present some current, preferably path-breaking work.  And we are doing one thing that is pretty cool, but at the moment its path is muddy, incompletely cleared, and god only knows where it is going.

But that weird place where you’ve got equal measures of “there is some really great stuff here” and “I have no idea what this all means” is also one of my favorite moments in a research project.    And being able to get to and then beyond those moments consistently, across a very wide range of topics (aesthetics, investing, hair removal), is actually what I think has been the recurring focus of my work over the last fifteen years or so.

That’s also my other major ‘work in progress at the moment’  – trying to articulate for a broad business audience a way of thinking about the ideas and uses of ethnographic work.  That’s the nice way of saying that I’m working on a ‘trade’ book.   The book as it is laid out now has three parts.  The first two are kind of predictable: one a short and simple theory and background overview, the other a very practical section about planning and data collection and analysis.  But when I got done with outlining those two nuts and bolts parts, it still seemed to me like I was not conveying something that characterized the best work I’d been involved with.   So there’s a third section to the book, which is what I’d like to talk about today:

Nice Work: notions of an effective practice:
This section focuses on the things that make ethnography valuable as an ongoing part of research, design, and development efforts.  Not so much the information, the things studied or described or explained, but the way that a really good practice becomes a valuable –I’ve learned that nothing is ‘indispensable’ in business– part of an enterprise- and how a practice gets better at what it does, through the doing of it, over time and experience.
[SLIDE 2 ]
This part of the book has three main sections to it – the ‘we’ of it, or what it means to think beyond individual researchers; then what support a well-situated practice requires (and why that matters) and finally “maybe it’s …” which I’ll explain when I get to it.   And I will apologize in advance for any “as I said earlier”s that I may have missed in swiping from my draft chapters to put this together.

Definitional bits
Before the first section though, there are a few things about the way that I think about research that need to get laid out.  Otherwise, some of the things about how I think about a practice will seem at least capricious if not just plain weird.
[SLIDE 3 ]
1 Ethnography as deliverable
When introducing ethnography to a lay, or — what is often more difficult — to a partially knowledgeable audience, the easiest thing to do is to focus on the data gathering tools and the stance toward situation and context that distinguish ethnography and its heritage from most research in business.  But what often happens in doing that is that another critical component gets less attention — the idea that there is an ethnography , which is the end point of the research, a thing created through the practice of doing ethnography.

The best analogy I’ve found for this is thinking about biography:  There is the work of the biographer, — sifting through letters and diaries, interviewing living sources, piecing together schedules and itineraries, inquiring into what else was going on around the subject at the time – which is separate from the finished project, A Biography  which tells a story, uses some data and discards others,  and most importantly, evidences an authorial hand.  Most people will accept the idea that Carl Sandburg wasn’t “channeling” Abe Lincoln.   Similarly then, the point of ‘doing’ ethnography is to eventually create ‘an ethnography’ and the latter should not be reduced to the former.

(SLIDE 5)
2. Why Models.
My take on the shape that those ethnographies take is also something that is probably a bit idiosyncratic, but I think it is a response to the requirements of working with business, design, and product development functions, rather than purely academic audiences.   That is the emphasis on models.   IF, from the beginning of a research effort you know that you are trying to build an explanatory model, not just see what is interesting about x location or y phenomenon, you approach the work somewhat differently. It informs your planning, your approach.  Thus it becomes important to know what the form of this thing is.  And how you’ll know when you get there.

SLIDE 6 (SNEEZY)
Ways of building models, thinking with models, challenging and testing them is mostly part of the analysis.   But just quickly, so you have an idea of what I’m thinking about when I talk about their role in practice, here’s one of my favorite examples.
(short description of the sneezy model)
The key thing here is that this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive representation of either the data or the implications, but a way into both of them.  And in that abstracted sense, it is much different from the biography analogy.   Nor do I want to reduce ethnography to the model.  But in the applied world, what you use to communicate will inevitably become the ‘handle,’ the lens for the work, and models, I think, are an extremely effective tool for that.
SLIDE 7 (SHORT LIST)
There are two sorts of approaches to understanding the value of models.  One is what value they provide as objects, the other the way that they function in the process of understanding, explanation, and development. – etic and emic, I suppose.

So, first, a partial list of things that models do and can be and why those are so useful.   For this, I usually take DNA as my ur-example – so let that – even if it is just your seventh grade science recovered memory version float while I hit these topics quickly.

• A common object,
• Resilience,
• Extension,
• Testability,
• Explanatory reach,
• Reusability

SLIDE 8
Locating the work
I think the second aspect has been more critical to the way that I’ve thought about working in this space than just about anything else.  It’s the idea of the things produced by research – especially models – as occupying a place in a developmental dialogue with a whole series of other real and conceptual interlocutors, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Placing the research means asking, “to what end ?” you undertake research within a larger process of making new things, or making things better.  It seems to me that the most productive approach is to think of the work that research does as spanning a gap between conditions–between what there is now and what might be, between our way of seeing the world and someone else’s way, between the conditions and the alternatives.  And between research and the development of new things.

GEERTZ SLIDE

I’m skipping a bunch of both my vastly oversimplified reading of Clifford Geertz’ work and lots of other bits that I’ve thrown in that he should not be blamed for to get to this diagram built solely for my cheap rhetorical ends.
Geertz’ understanding of the triple relationship between the cultural system being studied, the researcher doing the studying, and the role of ethnography in that relationship is both sophisticated and simple, offering clarity, parsimony, and, I think, an enormous opportunity.  For Geertz, the idea that any amount of description could ever stand in for the native understanding of a culture is wishful folly.  This is not to say that anything ‘other’ is somehow sealed, forever unavailable to inquiry from the outside, but nor can we ever eliminate the gap, the difference.
(explain how ‘deep play fills this role)
This is the key, interpretive moment in the work of ethnography-we can look for ways to make the structure, meaning, and function of another system resonate with our understanding of our own culture, our own interactions, our own experience.  By saying, “that phenomenon does for them what this does for us” without ever reducing one to the other, we are able to build, chunk by chunk, an understanding of how the whole fits together without ever claiming that we see it just as they do.  Representing that connection as an integrated idea, as a coherent and generative thing transforms reams of fieldwork notes into “an ethnography.”

GEHRY
Then, let me connect by analogy the process of making new stuff with another compressed example: what is by all accounts one of the single most significant works of architecture of the last century: Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum building in Bilbão, Spain. The Bilbão Guggenheim is situated on what had to have been one of the more difficult starting points from which to ever imagine such an experience: A disused industrial site, away from the heart of the city, with no magical vistas of mountains or views of the sea; a drab riverbank where barges were the most likely passers-by.  That was Gehry’s “now.”  What he made of it was the exuberant titanium-sheathed glory that critics and the general public alike have loved ever since its doors opened.  But in between the awful site and the wondrous realization was a little series of sketches that Gehry has singled out as a central moment in the building’s development.

This sketch, little more than intimations of forms and a gesture toward the relationship of the building’s major volumes, is in many ways the solution, the imagination of the future reality.  It is, in pencil lines as abstract as any anthropological analogy, the building that was “still to come.”  This is ‘the design’ which brings Bilbão into being as much as the final plans or the detailed programming of the interior.  It works in the same way as “deep play”‘ makes the cockfight sensible in Geertz’ essay.  Gehry’s sketch, Geertz’ notion are strong and generative constructs.    They are solutions that relate the conditions of the present, the concrete and the immediate, to something distant, other, and future.  And thus enable us to bring them closer to reality.  They are, in other words, the ideal to which an ethnography, even one about hair care or silverware drawers, should aspire if innovation and inspiration are to come of it.

I’ve been playing with ways of explaining and illustrating this relationship for years.  And recently had the expected but still humbling moment when a colleague hands you a 40 year old volume and says, ‘did you ever see this?  In this case, the colleague is Hugh Dubberly, and the book is Stafford Beer, Decision and Control: The meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics ( John Wiley, 1966).

BEER diagram & explanation
On to the snappy segue.   I don’t know how much of what follows can be described as theoretically grounded.  It is more of a reflection on and distillation of ways of working, none of which leaped full-grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.  Instead it is a collection of practices that evolved over somewhere between 8 and 12 years of work with a group of very smart, very dedicated, and often just plain weird folks.   And looking at the practices now, it is very hard to say, “John invented that bit, or Maria articulated that bit or Lisa brought that in from b-school and perverted it to our ends”  –WHICH is the first point I’d like to make.
2 THE WE OF IT

Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, could and did reckon their time in the field in years rather than weeks.  Timeframes like that are not something that one sees very often in a brief from a Fortune 500 company these days.  On the other hand, though, the best groups working in industry today have an advantage that most traditional anthropologists did not: that they are, in fact, working groups. Practices in the sense of a working collective with both complimentary and shared expertise, which gets better over time and experience.

I don’t think that that the successes of research groups such as PaPR here, or Xerox PARC’s Work Practices and Technologies group, or even consultancies like E-Lab were simply a function of having a collection of really smart individuals, though that didn’t hurt.  Rather, I think that the exigencies of the business world’s time frames and the explicitness of the audiences  (a particular business unit charged with bringing a particular thing to fruition) to which these groups were responsible forged an approach to ethnographic research that is collective and combinatorial.  Much more like the “body of work” that a senior academic has built at the peak of a career than a portfolio of work for hire.
Go to an academic conference in most of the social sciences and the work that is being presented will almost universally be awash in the singular possessive case:  ”My work shows..”  ”I have found…” and so on.  But listen to the most senior of the representatives of good practicing ethnographic groups and you’ll hear “Our work… ”  ”We think…” “We’ve approached this ….”

This isn’t an artificial posture.  Research of the “my insight is …” or “I have noticed …” variety can’t support the demands of working within a business setting.   But a working group that knows how to use shared frameworks and approaches, which has in place not only practices but deep patterns of trust and explicit communication can work exceptionally well under these circumstances and deliver useful models.   Scope and complexity of the problem, time and organizational demands give rise to both the necessity and the value of thinking about this kind of work as an supra-individual process.   I avoid the use of the term “team” in this discussion not solely because it has been so badly overused that it has lost most of its saliency, but because the biggest shift isn’t one of organizational form or group behavior.  It is in the way in which the work itself is conceptualized and the tools, processes and thinking which surround that different form.

PRACTICE AND OWNERSHIP –
When the work gets outside of an individual researcher’s head, it takes on a life of its own.  And that leads to important changes in how it can be addressed, shaped, and used.  Ideas stop being tied to the person who first proffers them.  As explanations and models and interpretations take form, it is often impossible to say who has come up with any particular part.  Everyone is invested in the whole and that whole is correspondingly stronger.  When a “team” uses a dissected, “you do that part, I’ll do this part” approach — an analytic production line as it were — it is as different from what a real practice can accomplish as a mass-market subcompact is from a hand-built luxury sedan.

But to get to that collective sensibility, externalizing is necessary.  I think of it is in some ways as the obverse of the old ‘blind men and elephant’ parable – not the objectivist take that it usually functions as, but the notion that sometimes there is not an elephant there at all, and you need to work from the parts to create a viable being. That is much harder.

I think the Beer diagram plays well again here.  Especially the idea of  ”rigorous formulation” over insight.   A model that is a ‘common object’ is by implication an independent object, even if, as in Beer’s description, it may have multiple implicit formulations before it coheres into a ’scientific’ model.   And the only way for that to happen is for it be externalized.  Given a form so that it can be poked at, tested, extended, and refined.   Which leads to the next point.

Criticism and growth.
One of the things that years of working with design professionals has taught me is the value of putting ideas out as first approximations. The charrette and the “crit” traditions from design, art, and architecture schools are quite different from the preemptive defense model of most academic training.  They require that an idea be given some form, externalized in some way which allows it to sit on the table and get poked at.  Without anyone getting pissy about it.  In day-to-day practice, that enables a kind of Socratic openness to criticism, and each critical revision takes the emerging work a bit further from any individual head.  The upside of that, of course, is that it is a hell of a lot easier to criticize, change, or throw away something that isn’t all yours and only yours.

DELIVERY
The final bit of this is that models are built to go out into the world from early on in the process – the ‘we of it’ is always, eventually, a much bigger group than just the folks who create the construct.  Without imagining, without knowing that other audience, the work can get hermetic, self-referential; embroiled in what we used to call “beige arguments”.   Like storytelling itself, the notion of an audience is an inescapable reality, baked into the work from the start.  What it implies is that all the good fieldwork in the world, all the best-intentioned and well-done analysis will end up gathering dust on the top of a file cabinet in someone’s office if it hasn’t been shaped into something that accomplishes an end for the client — who is usually not just one person either – so creating a ‘voice to voice’ resonance is a matter of a collective imagining the reception of another collective.

– Ok, there’s more to this section that ties models back in as a vehicle for this kind of delivery, and communication, but I think you get the idea, and I really would like to hit the other parts of this because I think that they are in some sense the less obvious, more interesting and perhaps controversial bits.

3.  THE WELL -SITUATED PRACTICE
The infrastructure built around doing work matters in a substantive way.  The support and nurture of a practice contributes to its character, not just its efficacy.     There are three main parts of this – Fieldwork and tools – all the practical things that a working practice has to have to do its work well.  Then the ‘intellectual property’ of a practice and making that socially available, and finally, connecting values and implicit aims to the everyday life of the working group.

I’m skipping the first part.  Kind of obvious, and it works better when you look at it in the details.    And I’m compressing the next two tremendously, but the basic points are worth mentioning.

IP IN FOUR DIMENSIONS
Where analysis takes place matters.   Because, as should be obvious by now, it doesn’t happen entirely inside the head of a single researcher.  Part of what a good infrastructure does is to provide a way to get ideas out of individual heads and onto walls, into rooms – anywhere where they can be seen, criticized, engaged with and built upon.  Along with making both data and analysis physical is the idea that there is evolution of an analysis over time – ‘versioning’ which can and should be made visible and accessible.   This physicality ocontributes to practice through a couple of mechanisms – information persistence (keeping partial and abandoned data or analysis ‘in play’ even when it is not central), what I think of as “marking” the work – making apparent important but as yet incompletely articulated points or conceptual gaps — the way in which the gaps or tentative aspects of an analysis are made available for comment; and finally, the simple, organizational necessity of “socializing the work” – exposing it, making it familiar, allowing a wider audience to see it, know it, and get interested in it.  And that is helped, tremendously, if people know what you are about.  INFUSING THE SPACE WITH THE WORK
Advertising and architecture and design studios understand this.  Even law offices:  you walk into the place and you know what these people do for a living.  And in the good ones, you get a sense of how they do it as well, of what matters to them. You see the things that are the everyday focus and lifeblood of the firms.  I’ve never understood why should research be any different.  Making the values and focus of a practice evident doesn’t necessitate making them explicit or turning them into something formulaic like a mission statement.  I think of it more like a milieu, supporting and informing process, maintaining history and community.    In an ethnographically inclined research practice, “‘infusing the space’ can make for a very interesting place: data samples; collections, images and tools from old projects; models and heuristics.   You should not be able to walk through the place where a practice lives with stopping to ask, “what is that?”

All right.  Last bit. 4.  ”MAYBE IT’S…”
At E-Lab, we studied how French fries get made in fast food restaurants, what it feels like to have an allergy, how groceries are stashed in mini-vans, how people buy snacks at convenience stores, and a hundred other aspects of everyday life.  How odd and how fulfilling, then, to have that work described as “thrill-seeking romps through the banal, joy rides through the collective unconscious.”  (K. Cohen)
And they were.
But still, when I think about the models of models, the ‘tips’ for how to do and support the work, it seems that the essential something required to get from the application of methodology (no matter how flexible) to “thrill seeking romps.” isn’t in the models or the project rooms – or at least, not in them alone.

I think that ‘essence’ is best contained, reflected in a phrase my partner John Cain used well and often: “maybe its..”    ”Maybe it’s” is the quintessential design thought in some ways – imaginative, questioning, and subversive in the best possible sense — but when “maybe it’s …” is based in and responds to a complex representation of a real situation, recognizes the constraints of the larger problem, and is engaged with the work of imagining a particular future – (not just making it up), it becomes the bridge between the creative and the empirical; it is that essential something required to get from the application of methodology to valuable and useful final forms.

What it boils down to, I think, is ‘play’.  In really effective practices, the engagement with the data and the process of research is a kind of play – with ideas, with constructs, with hypotheses, with the future.  The forms that play can take are practically endless, of course.  And I’m not sure that any particular instantiations of it are what matters once you’ve managed to set the initial conditions and allow it both to flourish and occasionally, to fail.

But to make sure that play doesn’t get cornered into a kind of perverse, conceptual version of ‘casual Friday’, I think it’s useful to think about the distinct realms of a practice where you can make it matter and make it routine:  fieldwork, analysis, and storybuilding.

Play in fieldwork, is, of course, a riot.  Sometimes it is most apparent when it is paired with a kind of technical adventurism – taking simple tools like disposable cameras or SMS phones and turning them into reporting media.  Or play with the tools of other disciplines like the way that Tony has used maps as projectives.   Routinely using pilots to try out questions, tools, places even, that seem a standard deviation or two out from usual practice.    But what makes it all work is the discipline of debriefing and honest evaluation.   In the trying of these things, you find out what can be done, what cannot, and a whole lot of what you didn’t expect.  And the more these experiences are laid out in and to the practice as a whole, the richer the set of tools and practices that the whole group can bring to bear.

Play in analysis: As counterintuitive as it may sound, play has to be one of the most important aspects of analysis.  Again, it has a lot to do with taking risks, with forestalling the urge to close something down, go with the safe bet.  One of the aspects of deeply engaging play is the necessity of anticipating multiple possible paths to an end state, and working all of them.  Chess is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than checkers for just this reason.  In analysis, this means working with incomplete models, working with analogy and metaphor, engaging the work of fiction’s “suspension of disbelief”, taking things to logical as well as absurd extremes.   Which, again, argues for the incredible importance of a practice-based, rather than individual, approach to developing and maintaining intellectual capital in a practice, and for making work in practice materially and  socially available.

Play in story building. Play, as an attitude is equally important in story building.  Not in the foolish, ‘there are no bad ideas’ notion that pervades the worst versions of ‘brainstorming’ – because there are– the thing is, you should be able to have a bad idea and have it hooted down by your colleagues and still feel good about it.    An example:  We were studying how people use the interiors of cars so that the people who think about what cars should be like 10 years from now have something to work from other than their own daily frustrations tuning their FM stations and finding their cupholders.

We had lots and lots of data.  Tons of pictures.  Interviews.  Videotapes. All of that stuff.  And in the project room, all of that was up, somehow, on walls and tables and windows.  But for a couple of weeks, we weren’t getting anywhere.  We’d get a bunch of people together and look, and talk, and argue, and get to interesting but not really compelling ideas.

Then one morning, I walked into the project room and there, facing the whiteboard were two desk chairs.  Drawn on the whiteboard was a dashboard and windshield.   On the floor, masking tape sketched out the doors and backseats and the center console.  From the beams overhead, string suspended a “moonroof” and lights sketched onto a reused square of foamcore.  I could see it.  I could see a car.  Sketched in space.  Made with a marker and some masking tape and two chairs.  And all around the dashboard were notes, arrows, index cards taped up in groups, and the beginnings of what would become a model of the different “modes” that people drive in.     That was play in both analysis and storybuilding.

If you treat research and methodology with dead serious earnestness, the only possible ideas, stories, forms, or critiques that get put forth are be safe ones.  I’ve always liked “well, now we know” as a mantra against conservatism.    Play is  a necessary attitude that, as Kris Cohen has written, “encourages the celebration of near-misses and failed attempts for the “near” and the “attempt,” not for the “miss” and “fail” aspects.”  The point is to avoid being formulaic about anything.  It is the counterbalance to the heuristics.  Play helps a practice turn past projects, models, mistakes and goofy acronyms into a useful junkheap from which to make fabulous new critters.  Which is what we’ve all been after all along, no? ‘

CONCLUSION
So.  There you have the musings of someone who’s done a lot of projects, some of which have gone well, some badly.  No matter how hard I’ve tried, I can’t quite escape the idea that there is as much art to this as science, as much tacit practice as explicit process.   Still, that idea that sometimes it is working brilliantly, and sometimes — even with the smartest of folks involved — the larger arc is faltering makes articulating it seem worthwhile.  Being able to say “nice work” on a regular basis makes coming to work awfully damn attractive.

9
Rick E. Robinson,  2005   — draft – not for distribution