This morning, as I am sitting down to write this blog entry in my rental apartment in Nogales, I peer through the window: The sun has illuminated the dark brown border wall that coils over the hilly landscape and reminds me of the spiked back of a stegosaurus. Six months ago I arrived in Southern Arizona to begin fieldwork with firefighters and paramedics for a new ethnographic project about emergency responders on both sides of the line, as the international boundary which abruptly separates Mexico and the United States is locally called. Though ethnographic fieldwork takes many forms – I am conducting interviews, participating in the daily activities at the firehouse, volunteering at a first aid station for migrants, teaching prehospital emergency care at a local fire district, and engaging with the first responder communities in Arizona and Sonora in multiple other ways – my primary activity continues to be writing.

I have always been a morning writer. When I was working on the manuscript of my first book, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (University of California Press 2015), I would shut the doors of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the forested suburbs of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was fortunate to spend my research leave, and would sit at my large desk, facing the barren trees outside, until noontime. I did it every day of the week for several months during a long and cold winter. The manuscript was complete and sent off to my editor on the eve of spring.

But during fieldwork keeping a regular writing routine has been difficult. The topic of our research inevitably shapes how, where and what we write, and my study of fire and rescue services under heightened border security is no exception. Often I spend the entire day on shift with the crew at the fire station, riding along with them to the scenes of emergencies. Other days there is training, community events, long drives to do interviews at more remote fire districts. Having a background in both journalism and in anthropology affects how I go about conducting research. Instead of dividing my time into chunks for doing fieldwork and writing up fieldnotes, I tend to pursue the story as far as it takes me before I finally sit down to reflect on the new material. I think of it as combining the in-depth view of an anthropologist with the fervor of an investigative journalist. It can be exhausting.

Because of this, I write anywhere and everywhere, whenever I have a minute to jot down my thoughts and observations. I scribble names, places and dates in my pocket notebook, in a handwriting that has become illegible, especially when the entries are made while riding in the back of a fire engine or on a 4×4 truck plowing through the dirt roads to where the fence between the U.S. and Mexico is nothing more than a Normandy barrier and four-strand barbed wire. I type abbreviated notes on my cell phone during stops at gas stations along the I-19 connecting Tucson with Nogales, and whenever pulling out my phone to quickly enter some text seems more polite – and less intrusive – than opening my notebook. When I am driving and I can’t pull over to jot down a thought that I want to keep, I record voice memos; I have done so passing through Border Patrol checkpoints on Arivaca Road and on Sasabe Highway, back when I used to count the times I was stopped and to document what the agents were saying.

I also take pictures. Many pictures. On my cell phone or using one of the two DSLR cameras that I carry around. I take pictures of dumpster fires and vehicle accidents, of picturesque sunsets over the Tumacácori and the Baboquivori Peaks, of hazardous materials equipment and of tacos al pastor being prepared for dinner at the firehouse. In fact, photography has been a particularly important ethnographic tool. I am frequently asked to take pictures of official community events, bi-national meetings, and training exercises, and to later share them with the participating agencies and the media. As a designated photographer, however, I may not have time to take notes, so the pictures later become cues for the activities that took place and help me write about what happened. Writing from photographs changes the way we convert experiences and events into prose, suggested Casey N. Cep in an article for the New Yorker. They serve as powerful tools to enhance memories about the encounter that begin to twist immediately after it is over. When I finally open my laptop and begin writing, I draw on all of these cues – notes on my cell phone, handwritten memos, voice messages, photos. They neatly fall into places and begin to form a story. I may not have a well-structured writing routine, but this haphazard creation of fieldnotes has been surprisingly productive.

Fieldwork also precipitates other genres of writing such as writing for the public. There used to be a delay, a pause between ethnographic research often conducted in remote locations, and anthropological publications carefully crafted at academic institutions and perfected through cycles of rigorous revision. It could take years of going back and forth to the fieldsite before scholars would decide to share their findings with the public. Still today many monographs and research articles do not see the light of day until long after the events they depict have transpired. But this has been changing. Ethnographic fieldwork and public writing now happen simultaneously. Federal funding agencies that use taxpayer money are pressured to demonstrate the relevance of the research that they support to the society at large. Meanwhile, technological innovation and easy access to the internet allows us to share photos and news about our fieldwork instantaneously via e-mail, blogging or social media. These developments, among others, have led anthropologists to more openly talk about our work-in-progress. More of us now report preliminary findings from the frontlines of ethnographic research.

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Sonora and Southern Arizona over the last half a year, I have written across different genres of public writing. I created a public website, http://www.borderrescueproject.com/, which I update with news, excerpts from my fieldnotes and interviews, reflections written by my research assistants, and numerous photographs. The website is also linked to the project’s Twitter account and displays a feed of the most recent events linked to my work. At the request of my contacts in the fire service and emergency management, who invite me to participate in their trainings and meetings, on a couple of occasions I wrote brief news pieces and sent photographs to the local newspaper in Nogales, Arizona. I have also given interviews to several Mexican news outlets in Sonora. As a former journalist, I am familiar with the practice of deploying information to promote activities in the community and I eagerly engage with the media in ways that benefit the people with whom I work. News media provides a powerful and readily available channel to communicate the significance of the research project to the broader public. With that in mind, I wrote an op-ed for the Guardian that was a critical commentary on existing federal policies that blend emergency healthcare with immigration policing, and thus the riskiest form of public writing I have done. This article likely had more readers than any of my scholarly publications ever will. It was shared instantaneously via social networks and thus was immediately available to the firefighters and paramedics who have been participating in my research project. I had reasons to fear their reaction. Politics are generally seen as a threat to camaraderie, and thus are a taboo topic in the firehouse where people of different political leanings have to rely on each other in life and death situations. Had they found my op-ed to be politically aggressive or provocative, my fieldwork relationships could have ended there and then and the future of my research would be uncertain. To my relief, they liked it.

Messages to the media are different than other narrative genre more familiar to anthropologists. In “Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics”, Didier Fassin writes about the challenges that scholars face when their research goes public. The shift from the academic realm to the world of news journalism, which substitutes nuanced accounts of complex social reality with flashy, explicit headlines, is often frustrating to those who invest years to understand a multifaceted problem with no easy solutions, such as the political, legal and economic conundrum on the U.S.-Mexico border. Talking to the press and writing for the public before the research is over can be even more problematic. Preliminary findings can be inconclusive or contradictory. What if, once you are back at your desk, going through your fieldnotes with analytical focus, you regret what you said or wrote while your experiences were still fresh like wet paint? It seems safer to create a distance between the messy stage of ethnographic research – the fieldwork – and the structured phase of reflection and scholarly production that comes afterwards. It may be wise to wait before you reach out to the public. But such caution has its cost: the lost opportunity to build and maintain bridges between the scientific community and the multiple publics who we want and need to address.

Writing in the field and writing from the field are forms of ethnographic writing that, because of their unpretentious character and temporary relevance, are overshadowed by academia’s focus on full-length monographs and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Fieldnotes posted on the blog may be unpolished and haphazardly put together, news articles too narrow and shallow, editorials and commentaries for the press – candid and biased (“wrinkles” which anthropologists as authors soften out after long hours spent on drafting and then revising our CV-worthy manuscripts), but they also come with the immediate reward of sharing knowledge in the making.

Writing is not the aftermath of fieldwork. Fieldwork is writing.

For me the most interesting part of it is watching journalists run up against issues of anonymity and academic ethics for the first time and try to come to terms with it. I think its important to push back against the idea that ‘ethnography’ is suspect as a form of knowledge because it anonymizes identities and makes them “all but impossible to fact check”. An article by Leon Neyfakh making basically this claim appeared, embarrassingly enough, on the same day as an article by Jesse Singal which did fact check ing them. Singal — clearly an anthropologist at heart — walked around the neighborhood where Goffman did fieldwork handing out donuts until he fell in with the people she writes about in the book. What is at stake in this debate? Ultimately, I think the discomfort that some feel with Goffman’s book is that it forces them to think about issues of generalization, particularity, and anonymity in a way they haven’t before. Welcome, journalists, to the world of social science theory and ethics! We have been dealing with these issues for some time!

The idea that ‘ethnography’ is less empirical, true, or relevant than ‘journalism’ or ‘chemistry’ because it automatically anonymizes its sources is incorrect. In fact, there is no such thing as a single genre called ‘ethnography’. We can see this clearly in Neyfakh’s piece — the experts he interviews profess a wide range of opinions about anonymizing the people you study with. In sum, opinions on anonymization vary widely within the academic community.

They vary across time as well. Anthropologists have a long history of naming names. Sometimes this is because we view our interviewees as teachers or partners. In other cases it because we viewed them as so removed from the world of anthropology that they would never meet our readers, and so what did it matter?

On the other hand, anthropologists have also written purely fictional accounts, as as the 1922 volume American Indian Life. Here, entire people are made up. The goal is to provide a sense of what typical Indian life was like, but to do so by telling a compelling (and made up) story.

And we’ve tried everything in between: composite characters based on a mashup of different people, transcribed autobiographies that are not fact-checked at all, theoretical critique in the form of epic poetry, dance based on initiations we’ve undergone and more.

So ‘ethnography’ is a fundamentally experimental genre, or perhaps a loose assemblage of genres, not a single thing that can be blamed for Goffman’s success or failure, let alone used to condemn a field or discipline. In fact, as Neyfakh’s article makes clear, many of the issues surrounding anonymization were foisted on ethnographers by the IRB process, and are thus exogenous to ethnography itself.

Neyfakh makes an important and valid point to protest that the power of Goffman’s book comes from the particular biographies of the lives she narrates. To argue that the importance of the book comes from the general patterns of social life it generates, but to sell the reader on these patterns with biographical particularities does constitute a bit of a bait and switch.

But at the end of the day, her decision to write in this way is not a result of the general professional standards of ethnography, but because of the particular nature of her field site and her personal choices a writer. I think it was a legitimate choice, and I think Goffman’s book is a good read with solid ethnography and important lessons about race and policing in the United States. But it was a difficult one, one that no doubt left Goffman unhappy because her respondents could be identified, but also one that left journalists unhappy because they couldn’t be identified enough (at least, not without donuts). Which just goes to show that the Goffman debate is at heart not about problems of ethnography as a discipline, but about the fact that hard choices are hard, there’s no easy way to make them, and someone will always have preferred you make a different one.

Abbott’s latest book, Digital Paper, continues this focus on the sociology of knowledge production by providing us with a “library methods” book: a ‘how to do fieldwork’ book, but for people who do library research. Andrew Abbott writing a book on how to do research? I was destined to like this book before I opened it up. But having read it now, and with a critical (if biased) eye, I can honestly say that every student, professor, and intellectual needs to read it. It’s a superb ‘how to’ guide about writing a long research paper or thesis. But it’s more than that. It’s an entire theory of how scholars pursue scholarship. It’s a memoir of Abbott’s own research. It’s a pessimistic and slightly misanthropic ode to a quiet world of well-ordered card catalogs destroyed by the garish vulgarity of online databases. It’s an epigrammatic summary of a career’s worth of knowledge. It is — yes, I really mean this — life-affirming. It improved my own ability to do research. Everyone needs to read it. You need to read it.

Digital Paper is organized into 12 chapters. Abbot takes nothing for granted — chapter 3 explains how to find books in the stacks using a call number, and how an academic citation is structured. Other chapters offer tours through more advanced topics, such as how to read a text (at what speed, and with what sort of focus) and how to write with style.  As a result, Digital Paper can help total novices learn their way around a library.

But for seasoned researchers, the book is also (as I said above) life-affirming. Easily my favorite chapter is the second, which provides an autobiographical account of the research that went into Abbott’s paper “Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century”. I had read this paper — which is superb — before reading Digital Paepr. Reading the story of how “Library Research” was produced was absolutely fascinating. In fact, I think if you just assigned the “Library Research Infrastructure” paper and chapter 2 of Digital Paper to students, you’d have a pretty good sense of Abott’s wider project.

But most importantly, the story Abbott tells in chapter 2 is thrilling. When he decides to check out every thesis written in the University of Chicago library school, you gasp at his audacity. When he unexpectedly finds biographies of great librarians while browsing through the Zs, your heart starts beating faster. The chapter is, in sum, a vindication for the obsessive research who lives in a world full of people who don’t care about bibliographic minutiae. Abbott reminds us that our insane desire for thorough and exhaustive knowledge of a topic is one of our most valuable traits — all that stands between the present and a future where the highest quality social scientific information available is Buzzfeed lists of celebrities who look like Otters. And for students who think we’re crazy when we say “Why don’t you read 400 things for your comps list and then decide on 30 to actually be tested on” We can now point to Abott’s book and say: This is how The Quality does it.

So the book has basic chapters for beginners as well as stories of expert research. But most of the chapters in Digital Paper, however, are well-pitched for the intermediate researcher, and move step by step through a research project: the preliminary phase of slowly getting a sense of what you are actually writing about, the mid phase process of developing bibliography on your project, the art of browsing the stacks, how to analyze material, and how to keep a file system you use to keep track of the project. Most of the chapters about the ‘mid phase’ of a project. The end phase receives relatively little attention because at that point, as Abbott point out, it is mostly a matter of assembling the paper out of bits of things you have already written.

On the one hand, Abbott makes a very abstract argument about how library research (and actually all research) works: It is ‘nonlinear’. By this he means that other manuals on how to do research are wrong: You don’t start with a lit review, then take notes, and then write up your paper. Rather, people are always already multitasking — as we spend time in the library or on the Internet we are silently engaging in all of these ‘stages’ of research simultaneously. As these processes cycle over and over, we feed them with material that sparks new ideas. As Abbott puts it, “serendipity is not an unusual, once-in-a-lifetime, even once-in-a-project thing. It is the one constant factor in library research.”

This abstract view of library research might be a little too schematic for the undergraduates who read Digital Paper in order to learn how to find books in the library. I think Abbott’s big-picture view of research will resonate most with professors and graduate students. But Digital Paper is not as dense (and has more signposting) than “The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research”, where Abbott earlier made this argument. It is also much more concrete than “Methods of Discovery”, an earlier book of Abbott’s which zooms the camera out a bit too much. Digital Paper represents a plateau in Abbott’s writing on the subject of library research, and has hit the sweet spot between theory and accessibility. That’s one of the reasons that its so great.

One way in which Abbott helps bring this down to earth is his concrete instructions on how to find information. Many of us hate Google, but few of us hate it as much as Andrew Abbott, because few of us understand how search algorithms well enough to really be irked by them. ‘If you are looking for a needle,’ Abbot writes (I’m paraphrasing here), ‘why look in a haystack when you could go to a needle store’? By this he means that researchers should focus on high-quality sources, even if they don’t find everything (most things, Abbott believes, are probably not worth finding). Abbot prefers Web of Science searches (ranked by ‘most cited’) to Google. He’s also a fan of high-quality bibliographies, which can be out of date but still have a better signal to noise ratio than the Internetz.

I was skeptical about these recommendations, since my three biggest search engines are Google, Amazon, and Google. This is ok for me since I work in a small, young field (Melanesia), know most people in it, and I’m good at filtering noisy Google searches. So I tried a topic I’m interested in and don’t know very much about: Ernst Mach’s influence on Boasian anthropology.

Thanks to JSTOR, you can find and download Robert Lowie’s correspondence with Ernst Mach in a minute or two, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent entry on Mach… if you speak Philosophy. Mach’s writings are available on archive.org. So, yes: the Internet works and a tremendous amount of stuff is available… if you can make sense of it. But surely someone must have already written on this topic? There were scattered discussions of Mach (in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Deacon’s biography of Elsie Clews Parsons, and so on), but nothing sustained.

But lo, using a World of Science search ranked by citation, I discovered a book review that led me to John Blackmor’s 2009 book Ernst Mach’s Influence Spreads which includes a chapter on his influence on anthropology. In the end, the chapter was not as strong as it could have been, but the process of finding it did help me understand how Abbott’s methods work for students who don’t have expert knowledge of the subject. So yes, I now do research differently because of Digital Paper.

Another major thing I learned from Digital Paper was the value of project-specific files. Abbott is (proudly) a bit a dinosaur and still prefers to work in paper, with a collection of folders for each specific project. He still does this even when he’s working digitally, and claims that after teaching his students the benefits of paper files, the scales fall from their eyes and they all begin taking notes with pen and paper. Initially, I was like: Well, that’s very sweet, and Abbott is entitled to his opinion.

But then I slowly realized that over the years, my library of PDFs had basically turned into a noisy intranet of its own and that my reading notes, although well organized, were ramifying out of control. So for my last article — on the influence of population biology on the thought of Jared Diamond — I tried Abbott’s approach of having a separate database for every file.

Again, I was happily surprised by how much better this worked than my usual methods. Creating smaller databases allowed me to find needles out on the Internet and organize them in my own needle shop, rather than just shoving them into the smaller haystacks that lived on my computer. I don’t think Abbott completely sold me on paper files, but he did sell me on project-specific files.

The problem with project-specific files is that each project makes sense, but your overall biography starts to lose coherence — you don’t anymore have a personal library or personal notes, its just one bloody project after another. But this is part of the sobering truth that Abbott conveys to us: Life is a coffee plantation. It’s your job, as a social scientist, to turn it into a cup of espresso. We are filters through which tremendous amounts of information pass, and in the end the final product of the research process is a paper which condenses and explains life — and a researcher who is a better filter than they were before. Scholars are not ‘learned’ in the sense that they know a lot, because we forget most of what we know. We hold on to it long enough to turn it into findings. Then we move on. As anyone who has ever written a piece knows, your readers often know more about your topic than you do since they read it more recently than you wrote it. From libraries we come, and to libraries we return.

There is a lot more to say about Abbott’s book — his advice on doing mini-analyses is very relevant for long term fieldwork, for instance — but in the end I’ll just conclude by saying that Digital Paper is truly something special. I can’t recommend it enough to students, professors, and researchers.

LAURA FORLANO. writer and design researcher.

WHAT I DO.

I’m an ethnographic time traveler. For much of the last 10 years, I’ve been studying the ways in which the use of communication technology enables emergent socio-cultural practices around working and living in cities. For example, I’m interested in peer-to-peer networking, bottom-up organizing, co-located online collaboration, user-driven social innovation and open source urbanism, to name just a few. I’ve watched teens use mobile phones in Tokyo, observed activists building Wi-Fi networks on rooftops in Berlin, interviewed freelancers in Starbucks cafes in New York, watched doctors use computers in operating rooms, tested iPhone applications for navigating college campuses, visited design studios in Barcelona, and hung out with hackers in Budapest.

I’m also an activist. I’m not satisfied with merely describing the lived experience of socio-technical change through writing. I’m critical of the metaphors that the mainstream media uses to frame discussions about the interplay between technology, culture, and cities. For example, “Smart Cities” are often described as productive, efficient, and innovative, a continuation of neo-liberal discourses around technology and the economy. I’m concerned about the kinds of values that we embed in socio-technical systems, the opportunities that we bring to life, but also the possibilities that we take away by making these choices.

And I’m a maker. Most often, I’m making something that involves people. A workshop, a research salon, a lecture series. I think that part of my learning to work as a design researcher is related to learning how to facilitate face-to-face, hands-on workshops. I’ve run at least seven design workshops in the past year in order to bring together different communities of scholars, practitioners, activists, and makers. For example, in one workshop for a health-focused summer program in Brooklyn, four small groups of teens created stakeholder maps, discussed the values associated with a specific health topic (e.g.,obesity or HIV), and prototyped ideas for new platforms, products, and services. One group wrote the lyrics to a song about future technologies that they might use at the dentist, another wrote the script for a play about HIV, another created a Lego model of community health services and, finally, another created a series of iPad wireframes for a new application.

Luckily, design is a field in which all of these identities–scholar, activist and maker–can coexist. In fact, I believe that all of these are necessary in order to combine a reflective and critical social science perspective with a future-oriented generative process that results in some kind of change in the world. This can sometimes be mistaken for a kind of technological determinism. Yet if you are asking critical questions along the way and have a keen sense of the values trade-offs that you are making, I am hopeful that it is possible to create new ways of knowing things, doing things, and making things that can contribute to the world.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

Anthropology and design have been in dialogue for several decades, but one of the most obvious examples is in the human-centered (or user-centered) design research tradition. This tradition is based on empathy and primary research through field studies and qualitative interviews as a fundamental starting point for a design research project. Design, in this case, is not about the aesthetic qualities of a particular logo, product, service, or system but about its ability to serve user needs and develop solutions.

The shift toward a human-centered approach has been an important one for many companies attempting to innovate through the creation of new products and services. This approach was pioneered by anthropologists and sociologists working in the Bay Area at companies, such as Xerox PARC and IBM, in the 80s and 90s to design computer interfaces. More recently, companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Yahoo! continue to employ social scientists, designers, as well as people with hybrid skill sets, such as interaction design, in order to conduct user research. Over the past two decades, many design consulting firms that originally focused on industrial design such as IDEO, frog design, and Smart Design have promoted the use of a human-centered approach based on design research. One of the main professional conferences that bring together practitioners and academics working in the field of user research is EPIC, now in its 10th year.

One thing that I think anthropologists might learn from design is the idea of creating a more generative form of critique that makes the project better. In design, a critique is not a peer review, it is a collaboration. I recently got peer review comments back from a design journal and was surprised at the level of engagement with the work in a very deep, helpful, generative and productive manner. Often, in my experience, peer review in the social sciences is more about defining a field by policing insiders and outsiders. A more generative conversation, starting with “Yes, and” rather than “But” could help all of us do better work. Also, in the model of a design critique, it is possible to guide the conversation to focus only on certain aspects of the work such as the style or the content or the process. Adopting and/or developing a design critique model in anthropology might be a productive and interesting direction.

Another thing that I think anthropologists might draw from design is experimentation with more collaborative ways of working in teams, from graduate school though faculty positions and professional practice. In graduate school, I did very few team projects for courses and, at the time, there were not any opportunities to participate in collaborative research projects in my department. In addition, there is a lot of emphasis on doing your own project, collecting your own data and writing it up on your own. Since becoming a faculty member in a design school, I’ve seen the many ways in which student teams collaborate successfully and, sometimes, unsuccessfully. It is always exciting to see students working together to achieve a common goal.

Designers would benefit from a more rigorous incorporation of theories of culture as well as a more in-depth understanding of ethnographic research methods. Finally, while anthropologists are skilled storytellers through text, photography, and film, designers are trained in visual storytelling that includes images, charts, graphs, and artifacts. Greater collaboration across literary and visual traditions would result in better storytelling in both fields.

WHY NOW.

The human-centered design tradition is already built considerably on anthropology through the appropriation of field research and ethnographic methods (to the dismay of many anthropologists!). But a deeper engagement between design and anthropology might allow anthropologists to explore broader implications of their work beyond the academy through exhibits, artifacts, and workshops that engage different communities.

Human “needs” have been the focus of design work for far too long and we are beginning to see the planetary limits of our unevenly distributed needs. It is important to go beyond the human-centered focus and towards a perspective in which it is possible to empathize with and see the world through the lens of other kinds of entities (e.g., objects, artifacts, animals, nature, and the environment). While there are many design frameworks that break up the world into discrete categories for observation, it is time that we consider hybrid categories as new ways of seeing. For example, what of the human-object and the animal-technology? I’ve tried to do this by introducing new terms by which to understand these hybrid categories. For example, in one project, after studying Wi-Fi networks, community activists and mobile workers in a range of settings were struggling with ways to describe socio-technical and spatial phenomenon. I created the term codescapes as a way of referring to technological and spatial things simultaneously.

HOW I SHARE.

I use design to engage with broader and different audiences beyond academic journals. One of the things that I learned from the Breakout! project is how difficult it is to engage the public on the streets of New York in spontaneous collaborative activities. The project was unique in that it was the only project in the The Architecture League of New York’s Towards the Sentient City exhibition that was specifically about people’s behavior and emergent forms of collaboration. The other projects were about the display of specific artifacts in the built or natural environment (e.g., garbage, plants, fish, street furniture).

In the codesign project about urban technology, my collaborator and I, along with the help of several graduate students at the Institute of Design, produced a visual “Designing Policy” toolkit. We introduced participants to the intersection of urban technology, values in design, and co-design methods. The toolkit was a prototype, a visual artifact that contains a theoretical argument and a methodological approach, as my colleague Stan Ruecker and his coauthor Alan Galey have argued here.

Since the social sciences are still primarily focused on the book or the journal article as the primary mode of dissemination, recognition, and publication, I have found that design offers a wide range of more visual modes such as exhibitions, artifacts, and workshops through which to engage communities. Lastly, I have found short articles and blog posts on scholarly blogs like Savage Minds, Culture Digitally, and Ethnography Matters to be an engaging and fast way of disseminating ideas and learning about relevant communities of practice.

METHODOLOGY.

It is difficult to be critical and descriptive as a scholar while at the same time generative and future-oriented as a maker, all along maintaining a strong sense of core values as an activist. Yet this is exactly what is needed in order to develop a methodology that more deeply combines design and anthropology. In many ways, these three different mindsets are at odds with one another: the analytical mind of a social scientist, the exploratory mind of an artist, and the action-oriented mind of an activist.

Our institutions, academic or otherwise, do not allow use to cross these boundaries easily. I think that designers could benefit from a deeper and more rigorous engagement in the context of their projects, but this does not necessarily need to be through conducting fieldwork with ethnographic observations and interviews. What is more important is that designers know how to combine different methodologies in order to answer their research questions. For example, they need to know how to use secondary data, how to understand broader shifts in society, how to derive design principles from a range of sources. That is important.

I draw a lot of inspiration from generative, future-oriented methods such as design fiction, critical design, and speculative design. These methods were pioneered by London-based designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s. (For examples, see their new book Speculative Everything). These methods draw on critical traditions from art and architecture over the last century, such as surrealism and situationism, to use design as a means to ask questions, seek out alternative possible futures, and intervene in society through the creation of material artifacts.

While critical design has been criticized as elitist and apolitical, the purpose of these methods is to pose questions about alternative future possibilities, often in the form of dystopias. When you encounter critical design projects, your first reaction might be to laugh but you quickly encounter a sense of wonder, surprise, horror, or fear about the state of the human condition.

PEDAGOGY.

In my teaching, I encourage students to conduct fieldwork but I also believe that they can draw on their own experiences and still create very interesting work. By conducting ethnographic observations, they can become the creators and owners of their own data rather than believe that experts are the only people that can create knowledge.

But, overall, I’m more interested in fostering discussions of theory that allow my students to develop a more critical view of the world around them in order to inform their process of documenting, analyzing, and making. In order to design in and for a world of emerging technologies, it is necessary to be both skeptical and optimistic. By remaining skeptical, designers can be more aware of the ways in which sociopolitical values are embedded in design.

In my teaching, I encourage students to create artifacts that raise important questions around emerging technologies, such as cultured meat and networked objects. Some examples include a dynamic lighting system such as Philips Hue or a thermostat like Nest that is controlled by an iPhone application, commonly referred to as the ‘internet of things’ type projects. For the cultured meat project, my students created an event called “Meat Up: A Cultured Evening” that included a mini-exhibition of a series of artifacts where they asked participants to document their reactions in a small booklet and hosted a dinner party in order to spur conversation about cultured meat.

ME.

Laura Forlano is a writer, design researcher, and founder of Mobile Atelier. She is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2013. Her research is focused on the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices, and the future of cities. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

RESOURCES.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Materialities. Culture Digitally. December.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Ethnography Matters. September.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Making Waves: Wireless Technology and the Coproduction of Place. First Monday, Special Issue on “Media and the City.”

Foth, M. and Laura Forlano, Martin Gibbs and Christine Satchell. 2011. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place. The Information Society 25:1-9.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. Work and the Open Source City. Urban Omnibus, The Architecture League of New York. New York, NY. June.

KAT JUNGNICKEL. ethnographer. maker.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

I’ve always made a bit of a mess. I’ve splashed around darkrooms, attempted to stitch interdisciplinary collaborations, and knit a research blog. I’ve hosted exhibitions, printed ‘zines and folded origami-inspired data boxes. I regularly collaborate with colleagues to build and perform dubiously welded “Enquiry Machines,” and I’m currently sewing a range of new Victorian women’s cycle wear as a means of thinking about public space, mobility, and gender.

I am by training a social scientist and my key methodological approach is ethnographic; for the last decade this visual, material, and messy approach has been central to my work. I’m increasingly drawn to a hands-on, object-oriented and embodied practice for the potential it holds for unlocking new expressions and transmissions of the social. It is a practice that is sometimes compared with a designer-ly approach, yet for me it comes from a background in Communications, Visual Culture, and Sociology.

I see ethnography and design intersecting on many levels, from topics and contexts of study to the rich material methods we employ to develop thick description of the world around us. I’m particularly interested in how the ubiquity of digital technologies has transformed not only the subject matter for many researchers but greatly expanded the possibilities of communicating and circulating findings. In addition to a palette of new skills and tools, there is an open mindedness to experiment with design practices, a desire to look beyond conventional “knowledge exchange” to alternate forms of transmission and entanglements with bodies, technologies, materials and places.

Ethnography + design become particularly productive for me in relation to making. Making is a fascinating lens for thinking about how things come into being, how they are made, where and from what, and who can and cannot participate. The fact that making remains suspended in a dynamic state of practice means it can always be something more or different. Much of my work involves the study of grassroots or fringe communities who customise and adapt existing technologies, re-inscribing them with new meanings and re-imagining possibilities of use. I also, as noted above, consider making central to my own practice.

I make things to make sense of things.

WHAT I DO.

I’ve worked on ethnographic research projects in industry and academic contexts for over a decade. Topics have been diverse but they generally coalesce around new digital technologies, cultural practices, mobilities and gender relations.

For instance, my study of the digital cultures and practices of the largest community WiFi networking group in Australia describes the collective work of individuals committed to designing and building their own version of the internet, or what they called “Ournet, not the internet”. Recently published, DiY WiFi: Reimagining Connectivity (Palgrave Pivot 2013) tells ethnographic stories about a handmade, deeply local communications network forged around barbeques, located in backyards and on sheds, and made from found, adapted, and off-the-shelf materials, with trees, insects, makers’ skills, and the fierce summer weather all contributing to its distinct shape and character. It’s all about people, materials, contexts and things that work as well as things that don’t always go to plan. While these makers clearly imbue a Do-it-Yourself (DiY) ethos they do not do it alone–they Do-it-Together (DiT).

The relevance of rich descriptions of how people design things from the ground up lies in how they render visible large socio-technological systems and infrastructures, drawing attention to other shapes and possibilities of use. They ask new questions about things we take for granted. Here, WiFi makers shift the register–not by asking what we can do on the internet, but what we can do with it. Their design practice signals ways of connecting with each other that circumvents familiar and dominant telecomunication relationships. Fundamentally, what their messy, make-do methods and tales of resourceful ingenuity permit is another way of seeing how technologies come into being–and how things might be different.

METHODOLOGY.

Methodologically, there is a growing movement in the social sciences to embrace mess (Law 2004), liveness (Back & Puwar 2012), and inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford 2012) as generative of new ways of knowing and understanding social worlds. Inspired by this and the open source ethics of many of my research participants, I’m interested not only in how we as researchers do our research but also how we translate and transmit our processes and findings to different audiences.

How might our methods of making knowledge be different? What happens when we use the same design tools/methods as those we study? How can we resist tidying, fixing or flattening our ideas in order to represent them? What can and cannot be transmitted in certain forms?

These questions invite new ways of imagining how we might re-inhabit our research and the social worlds in which they are situated. It is approach, as Jackie Orr has written, “that insists on its own undoing.”

I’ve written about sticky tape methods, particularly in the context of DiY technology practices and maker communities . Here, sticky tape is an everyday tool and an evocative way of working. It is not irrevocably binding but rather temporarily holds stuff in place, enabling things to be re-stuck in alternate configurations. It is about being responsive to changing conditions, interpretations, and opportunities.

Sticky tape reminds us that design innovations do not have to be new or revolutionary to have novelty and impact. Inventiveness emerges in re-combinations of existing materials and problems. Because it evokes a particular method of binding, sticky tape epitomises an experimental hands-on approach, an openness to ideas and resourceful adaptability. It’s a tactic that fits with what Lury and Wakeford (2012) call “inventive methods,” which are methods that cannot be separated from the research problem at hand. They arise in the process of doing the research,transformed by the subject under study and vice versa. I apply this pedagogy to my teaching. I have organised enquiry machine workshops, 16mm filmmaking training days, and an open source electronics prototyping session to see if, how, and in what ways these practices might interrupt and intervene in students’ modes of ethnographic storytelling.

HOW I SHARE.

In addition to journal articles, book chapters, talks and lectures I make websites, exhibitions, machines, performances, and, most recently, frocks to think about, make, and share my research.

• Performance: Enquiry Machines (EM) are a series of performed artefacts that explore ideas or methods. EM #1, for example, focuses on the interview: a classic social science research method. Made of a constellation of bicycle parts, rubbish, and duct tape, itrequires two operators to co-pedal, collaboratively setting in motion a series of chains, chainrings, and cogs to power a dynamo light. Julien McHardy and I interview each other about interviewing as a method, bringing to light the sensual, social, physical, environmental, and technological skills required to elicit and make sense of data. The point is less about materializing answers or prototyping ideas and more about rendering visible the labour of making knowledge, formulating new critical approaches and literally seeing and touching methods in new ways. EMs are not meant to be finished or polished objects that speak for themselves. In fact, most fail in some way. They remind us that mistakes and tangents are just as important to our insights as the things that “work.” EMs are performed at academic conferences, in public streets, at design salons, and in workshops.

[vimeo 16281282 w=500 h=375]

Enquiry Machine #1 – Hackney from Kat Jungnickel on Vimeo.

• Objects: Bikes & Bloomers. Freedom of Movement: The Bike, Bloomer, and Female Cyclist in Late Nineteenth Century Britain. This project explores public space, new technology (clothes, bikes, new media, etc.), and gendered forms of mobile citizenship through the lens of cycle wear patents lodged by middle- and upper-class women between 1890-1900. The novelty of the research lies in interweaving archival data with the making of new Victorian cycle wear in collaboration with contemporary craftspeople–tailor, weaver, artist, and filmmaker. Sewing and wearing these historical garments literally enables me to get into my research. I’ve also been running DiY Bicycle Bloomer Making Workshops, which involve talking, making, and performing as a way of inviting others to do the same.

• Exhibitions: Bike Portraits.The challenge of spatially configuring sociological arguments in three-dimensional form ensures exhibitions take a regular and dynamic role in my practice. Planning an exhibition involves choreographing not only a select series of objects but also dealing with site specificities and complex relationships between actors. I am drawn to what happens, both planned and unplanned, when I take my research back into social contexts from which they originate. For the Cycling Cultures research, I exhibited a series of Bike Portraits—large, jagged, edged photographic collages made in collaboration with respondents, their bikes, and favourite places. Part of me—a shoe, shadow, or arm—is visible in each portrait as a symbol of the messy collaborative work. Portraits were distributed in five popular bikes shops/cafes across central London with viewers encouraged to cycle between sites to piece together the exhibition.

ME.

Kat Jungnickel is a lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She uses ethnographic and visual methods to study hands-on DiY and DiT (Do-It-Together) technology cultures and practices, and the creative use (and mis-use) of ordinary, everyday materials. She experiments with knowledge translation and transmission in the way she makes, curates, and circulates her research findings. Past projects have explored WiFi networks, maker communities and mobility cultures. Her recent book, DiY WiFi: Re-imagining Connectivity (Palgrave Pivot 2013) examines ethnographically the innovative socio-technology practices of Australian grassroots wireless networks. She is currently working on an ESRC (Economic Social Research Council) funded project that brings together her three of favourite things—sociology, cycling, and sewing.

www.katjungnickel.com

www.bikesandbloomers.com

www.transmissionsandentanglements.com

RESOURCES.

Back, L and N, Puwar, eds. 2012. Live Methods. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.18-39.

Hine, C. 2007 Multi-sited Ethnography as a Middle Range Methodology for Contemporary STS. Science, Technology & Human Values 32(6):652-671.

Jungnickel, K. 2014. Jumps, Stutters, Blurs and Other Failed Images: Using Time-Lapse Video in Cycling Research In Video Methods, by C. Bates, ed.  Routledge’s Advances in Research Methods Series.

Jungnickel, K and L. Hjorth. 2014. Methodological Entanglements in the Field: Methods, Transitions & Transmissions.Visual Studies, Special issue: Transformations in Art and Ethnography 29(2): 138-147.

Jungnickel, K. 2013. DiY WiFi: Re-imagining Connectivity. Palgrave Macmillian Pivot.

Jungnickel, K. 2013. Getting There… and Back: How Ethnographic Commuting (by Bicycle) Shaped a Study of Australian Backyard Technologists. Qualitative Research. 

Jungnickel, K. 2010. Research as a Form of Making. Making & Opening: Entangling Design & Social Science Conference. Goldsmiths, University of London.

Jungnickel, K. 2010. Exhibiting Ethnographic Knowledge: Making Sociology about Makers of Technology. Street Signs; Centre for Urban and Community Research. Goldsmiths, University of London.

Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Lury, C. and N. Wakeford, eds. 2012. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, London: Routledge.