Fieldwork Scott Klemmer · 17 April 2008 Really impressed by the comments. You're doing a great job. Heck, Tyra Banks even made an appearance. This activity is going to hugely improve your critical thinking, your reasoning about your own research, and your writing. You'll also get much faster. Every ACM paper I've published since starting at Stanford is taught somewhere, and at some time or other, all of the papers I first-authored in graduate school were too. Here's my hunch as to why: it's not the research, but the writing. Scott Klemmer · 17 April 2008

John Seely Brown's remark about reading books that have been marked up. Really impressed by the comments. You're doing a great job. Heck, Tyra Banks even made an appearance. This activity is going to hugely improve your critical thinking, your reasoning about your own research, and your writing. You'll also get much faster. Every ACM paper I've published since starting at Stanford is taught somewhere, and at some time or other, all of the papers I first-authored in graduate school were too. Here's my hunch as to why: it's not the research, but the writing. In general, it seems that folks found the Blomberg article more readily operationalizable, which I'd agree with. Reactions to the Suchman article varied widely, which I kind of expected. But it's really important. I can definitely relate to the feeling that a few folks had of being dropped right in the middle of a very deep debate without a sufficient amount of context or background.

Five Big Questions for Today (How) does it aid research to be reflective? What constitutes “natural” and “intelligent”? What knowledge does fieldwork produce? How/what can/should I observe? How should observation and design relate?

(How) does it help to be reflective? Candidate beliefs: Philosophical readings (like hard math) are a gating technique Fancy words help one sound academic Research endeavors make political and philosophical commitments 1) (How) does it aid research to be reflective and philosophical about one’s mode of investigation? - Philosophical readings (like hard math) are a gating technique. This is Stanford, it should be hard, and we need to differentiate students somehow. - Philosophy has lots of really long words. They help one sound more academic (intellectual masturbation) - Research endeavors make political and philosophical committments.

What is “natural” or “intelligent”? 2) What constitutes "natural", and what constitutes "intelligent"? - Read the new Suchman intro, p. 9.- Don Norman and the Thermostat- IMHO, the really high-order bits on Suchman's whole enterprise is the argument that actions are contingent on situations, and that meaning is socially constructed. (The Suchman v. "AI planning" debate )

What knowledge does fieldwork yield? A few candidates: None at all – it’s anecdotal The most authentic kind of knowledge, because that’s what people do Fieldwork is a great tool for generating insight, but it’s not “science” “To investigate and describe the use of the documentary method in particular situations” A word on authenticity and “lab knowledge” – remember to keep causation in mind. Why might the lab be insufficient? Or why might not the work generalize? All situated language “stands in an essentially indexical relationship to the embedding world”. (Pronouns are just a particularly salient example of this)

How do you know... What the important problems for users are? Whether an idea is a good idea? Why fieldwork? “Data is the only reliable outside arbiter” [Beyer and Holtzblatt]

Contributions and Implications …to design …to theory

Fieldwork methods in HCI Task analysis Contextual inquiry Cultural probes Ethnography Diary studies Pager studies

Rich Gold’s 2x2 science engineering art design theoretical applied e m

Hugh Dubberly’s 3x3