Thinking and Doing Ethnography in Service Design
Fabian Segelström, Bas Raijmakers, Stefan Holmlid · 2009
Abstract: One of the core issues for service design is to put users in the centre of design activities. Service designers use various empathic research methods, often loosely referred to as being ethnographic methods. Some of these methods should not be viewed as ethnography, whereas some should. Some of the rigour of academic ethnographic methods has been lost in the appropriation of ethnography. Practitioners often state that the requirements of rigour of the academic methods cannot be used in practice. In this paper we show that it is possible to do good and rigorous ethnographic research in design through two case studies. This is achieved without sacrificing applicability, and without radically diverging from the ideals of academic ethnography.