A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

Cicero

We work in an interesting field, a decidedly fertile one.  A field where social scientists, designers, business people, and ‘liberal arts majors helping mankind’ (as my sister’s business card used to say) come together to understand the experience of the mundane as well as that of the esoteric.  A field where understanding the underlying structures and sources of these experiences is as important as attempting to imagine where they’ll go in the future.  It is compelling and provocative on its own merits, but moreso when we give over the work we do to our partners, our interlocutors, as a basis for their work.

‘Applied Ethnography’, ‘Design Research’, ‘Qualitative Research’ – whatever we choose to call it, has arrived.  The past year has brought official imprimaturs from Business Week and the Harvard Business Review. And it is a sizeable enterprise -recent estimates put it at upwards of 15 percent of the 10bn worldwide market research market.  Fifteen years ago, that percentage was barely measureable.  Ethnographic work is growing both by cannibalizing older forms of qualitative market research and by opening up new applications in product development, technology and strategy.

As a result, there are literally thousands of ethnographic studies conducted every year by corporate research, design, strategy and marketing groups, and the consultancies which serve them.  The work is happening around the globe.  It is taking place in virtually every industry.  There are thousands of practitioners.  That should be a good thing, in terms of the growth and development of the field, the discipline. But only a tiny fraction of the work done in industry each year circulates in the community of ethnographic researchers in industry, and it shows.  Listservs such as Anthrodesign, and popular research bloggers like Steve Portigal find themselves beleaguered with the same basic questions and issues posed by beginning researchers fifteen years ago.

Despite all of the attention and all of the work, the progress of the field is slower, and more markedly individual than one would expect.  There are few conferences and fewer publications.  The annual EPIC conferences are an opportunity for practitioners to build networks and to advance the field in professional conversation.  EPIC’s single annual proceedings cannot conceivably contain (or critically examine) the breadth and depth of what the members of those communities find important to their work.

We propose to change that, fundamentally. Or more precisely, to provide the field with an infrastructure on which to change itself. To provide the opportunity to think differently about the work we do; about how we cultivate this field and increase its fertility.

It’s a fairly simple proposition:  make more of the work that gets done each year available to more of the field; provide a (large-scale) forum that will enable discussion, collaboration and theory building; and develop a set of shared practices and values for connecting the field to its partners, clients, and participants.

There are good models out there.  The open-source software movement and the attendant notion of “permeable boundaries” have revolutionized business models, not just software engineering. Social networking and web 2.0 tools have opened up new scales of collaboration and new ways of seeing and generating value.  And the proactive ethic of the Designers’ Accord has shown the power of leading an industry through the explicit articulation of (in the other sense of the term) values.

If you put all of that together, you get a discipline ecology, with separate but intertwined platforms for data, theory, and practice standards.  Of course, it is not that simple.  So we’re trying to start with the right blend of practicality and ambition, and through that engage the broadest part of the field in an emergent approach.

There are three ‘legs’ to what we are proposing:

a socially-networked, large scale repository of field research;

a collaborative critical and theoretical writing and publication network for the field;

and a community-developed articulation of values to which members of the field (both individually and corporately) subscribe to and develop.

The first piece is a ‘work-in-progress’ site named Pulp.  Pulp is an ‘online salon’ for a new field.  In some ways a multi-author blog, but instead of daily posts,  it is built around “works in progress” by a wide range of folks who are working on ideas, books, and articles on or about the intersection of design, business, social sciences, and culture.  In Pulp, authors will get thoughtful, critical feedback from their peers, along with editorial and communication design support as they develop their arguments and build bodies of work. For the authors, Pulp provides the support of a writing group, along with new tools for pushing that work and exposure to a large field.  For the larger professional community, Pulp provides early access to cutting edge thinking about the theory and practice of this new field.

As a collective, most of the professionals in this field are trying to figure out some aspect or another of how we work, what’s important about it, and where the field might be headed, should be headed.  We are agnostic regarding job titles, backgrounds and specific interests—this isn’t a blog “about” service design, or about design thinking, or ethnographic research or the social implications of new product development.  But any of those might be what someone is working on in one of the pieces up here.  What’s more important is the ‘working on’ aspect of it and the openness to development, input, and feedback that a working group of peers provides.

When I was in graduate school, I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisors (Wendy Griswold, now at Northwestern) on the sociology of culture.  There wasn’t a curriculum.  Wendy didn’t lecture.  There were no grades.  And it went throughout the year, year over year, with a slowly changing composition of graduate students from across the university and faculty members from Chicago and various sorts of interesting visitors.  We presented work in progress to one another.  We shared drafts of papers and chapters. We critiqued what we read and we argued (in the best of senses) about what we were working on and how we were thinking about it. And a couple of months later we’d bring back the new version and see what everyone thought.  It was perhaps the single most valuable part of my graduate education.

We’d like Pulp to have that feel, and serve that function, although at a different scale.  The idea of a salon (think Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table) gets at that idea pretty well.  So, Pulp is not any one person’s blog.  And it is not a running commentary in short form on topics of the day.  But in the breadth of contributors, and in the evolution of new ideas, it will be something worth keeping an eye on, a link to, or a feed from.

Larger in scope is The ACME Review, our handle for the system that builds a repository of fieldwork data open to the entire field.  One that, like Wikipedia, gets better the more it gets used.

We know how difficult it is for practitioners to share work that has been fielded with the express intention of addressing a particular client question.

Corporations, consultancies, and individual researchers spend thousands of hours and lots of money re-discovering various wheels every year. Rarely are they able to build, year over year, segment over segment, on prior work.  It is very difficult for a new research program to get a good sense of what has already been done, even at the most basic level.  Because the research is qualitative, it has seemed stubbornly resistant to the kind of scaling and re-use that quant research enjoys.

With a nod to Warner Brothers, ACME Review would use a simple rubric and a set of templates and guidelines to aggregate a database of case studies across industries.  The rubric would guide the translation of single cases into “anonymized” research for the (fictional) ACME Corporation.  Elizabeth Churchill developed the basic idea of this rubric for a conference several years ago, and while it is slightly tongue-in-cheek it works well as a way to deliver content, methodology, and analysis, without disclosure of client IP.  Using the model of a confidential marketplace, a la Angelsoft, we see the possibility of quick growth to industry-standard scale.  Methodology, models, and concrete findings become available and more importantly, organized and searchable.  Access to that database returns value to both researchers and member corporations.