Ethnography has gained considerable prominence as a technique for informing CSCW systems development of the nature of work. Experiences of ethnography reported to date have focused on the use of prolonged on-going ethnography to inform systems design. A considerable number of these studies have taken place within constrained and focused work domain. This paper reflects more generally on the experiences of using ethnography across a number of different projects and in a variety of domains of study. We identify a number of ways in which we have used ethnography to inform design and consider the benefits and problems of each. KEYWORDS Systems Design and Development, Ethnographic Study, Design Methods, Studies of Work.

Even the most cursory glance through recent proceedings of the biannual participatory design conference shows that ethnography is becoming an increasingly widespread technique in work-oriented design. This paper (1) explicates the rationale behind participatory design’s ‘turn to ethnography’; (2) identifies central problems with the technique’s employment from participatory design’s point of view; (3) presents methodological solutions developed in the course of designing a prototype supporting the work activities of some 2500 potential end-users distributed in over 250 offices around the world. Emphasis is placed on attention to working language as a reproducible means of getting hands-on work and organisation, particularly in large-scale settings.

In this paper we argue that industrial development of interactive systems has to recognise the social dimension of work if they are to fully meet the real needs of their users Under current approaches this depends on whether an individual requirements engineer implicitly applies a user-centred approach and recognises the importance of cooperation and is sufficiently sympathetic and intuitive to understand the work and reflect this in the system requirements. We wish to move beyond this by allowing for the provision of a more systematic incorporation of the social dimensions of work. To this end we focus on developing a number of alternative models for involving ethnography in the requirements process and a more systematic approach to the presentation of ethnographic material. Our approach to presented ethnographic information is based on the use of number of defined viewpoints and is embodied within a general hypertext tool.

Abstract. This paper describes experience obtained through a joint project between a university research group and a shipping company in developing a prototype for a global customer service system. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping, but succeeded in developing a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. A major reason for the success of the project is due to an experimental and multiperspective approach to designing for practice. Some of the lessons to be learned for object-orientation are (1) analysis is more than finding nouns and verbs, (2) design is more than filling in details in the object-oriented analysis model, and (3) implementation is more than translating design models into code. Implications for system development in general and objectorientation in particular consist in the preliminary respecification of the classical working order: analysis – design – implementation. Keywords: Large-scale system development, multiperspective application development, cooperative design, ethnography, object-orientation, rapid prototyping, evolutionary prototyping, OO-tools, experience report. 1

This paper describes experience obtained through a joint project between a university research group and a shipping company in developing a prototype for a global customer service system. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping, but succeeded in developing a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. A major reason for the success of the project is due to an experimental and multiperspective approach to designing for practice. Some of the lessons to be learned for object-orientation are (1) analysis is more than finding nouns and verbs, (2) design is more than filling in details in the object-oriented analysis model, and (3) implementation is more than translating design models into code. Implications for system development in general and objectorientation in particular consist in the preliminary respecification of the classical working order: analysis -- design -- implementation.