6.2. Exploring the integrations of emic and etic views and knowledges

The research question number 4 “What kinds of knowledge and whose views of work practice are legitimate in sensitizing system design to actual everyday work practice?” has traversed throughout the different perspectives in which I have engaged in this thesis. In the heart of my work has been to reflect on the different views and knowledges involved in the integration of work practice and system design, for instance, in fieldwork to study radiology practice and in organising interventions that integrate ideas from both ethnographic studies of work as well as participatory design.

Practitioners immersed in the everyday practice can verbalise but a part of their ordinary work activities whereas another part remains unarticulated because these aspects are either too mundane or taken-for-granted for recognition. To gain access to this invisible or tacit knowledge that nevertheless is integral to the accomplishment of everyday work, an outsider has to make the commitment to its observation for a sufficiently long duration of time. The fieldworker constructs her emic-etic understanding of work practice by familiarising herself with and learning about the situated views of practitioners and by systematically working them into a synthesis.

The practitioners’ views are necessarily partial; the workers see and know the work practice from within their situated positions and according to their occupational points of view. The fieldworker’s understanding is also partial although in a different way. The practitioners have a thorough knowledge of their defined area of responsibility whereas the fieldworker’s view covers more holistically the current practice but is limited when it comes to historical extent and depth of lived experience. Partial views have often been taken as a restraint, especially in connection to practitioner participation, but here they are seen as a richness of the actual necessity of work practice.

The participant interventionist can create possibilities for increasing sensitivity towards work practice in system design by using as a vantage point her emic-etic understanding of work practice which she has gained through participant observation. She can constructively utilize her outside analytic view and her understanding of the lived experience from within the actual work practice as well as her own lived experience gained during the fieldwork. She can use this understanding and provide other participants with the possibility of actively reflecting, questioning and reformulating their understandings. Together with this goes the promotion of an awareness of work practice as materially and technologically mediated social activity involving a multiplicity of diverse knowledges, and as an ongoing process encompassing change.

The practitioners may well be the best experts in their jobs, but they rarely have a chance to form a more analytic stance towards their own work practice. However, they can - under favourable conditions – gain distance to the daily duties in order to be able to analyse. The fieldworker’s view is needed in making work practice visible and intelligibly represented so that it is accessible for exploration. Having access to the everyday activities as outsiders, the practitioners become able to explore and join their local knowledge and lived experience with the observed activities. Grounding on their contextual understanding and employing the new analytic distance, the practitioners can recognise what is intrinsic in the unfolding activities and events, and give them meaning from within carrying out the work in actual practice.

The fieldworker may provide faithful descriptions of current work practice, but it is another issue to project them to the envisioned context and to use them in assessing ideas for future technology. The practitioners are capable of envisioning realistic images of the future and evaluating the consequences as they have lived experience of work. They can bring in their historical perspective and extensive lived experience of everyday work into delineating a continuum of work practice transformations through an analysis of existing ways of working. This horizon of work practice transformations can then be expanded through juxtaposition and projection towards new technology use and future work practice. The identified aspects of work can be as if implemented in and compared over the varied contexts comprising the horizon of work transformations. Their importance as design issues can be evaluated through juxtaposition to understand which of the issues are so inherent to the essence of work that they need to be revered and valued no matter what kind of technological environment is in question (e.g. the smooth flow of successive tasks in changing cases when performing several interpretations in series in Karasti 2000, publication IV, pp. 11-13, and the simultaneous comparison of side-by-side images in Karasti 2001, publication V, pp. 26-28).

The inherent social nature of forming an understanding of work practice in system design is widely recognised. The Lancaster CSCW group has attended to the problematics of communication between ethnographers and software engineers by developing support for the representation of ethnographic records in a more designer friendly way (Hughes et al. 1997, Twidale et al. 1993) but they have not invited practitioners to participate. Approaches with roots in Participatory Design typically rely on mutual learning between users and designer/researchers (Bødker et al. 1987, Bjerknes & Bratteteig 1987) without showing a further interest in how learning from one another takes place in practice and what is involved in it. The Work Practice and Technology group in Xerox PARC, on the other hand, has investigated the actual discourses of co-construction where ethnographers and product designers together find the relevance of work practice for design (Blomberg & Trigg 2000).

I have studied the processes where multiple views and knowledges are co-constructed into shared understandings (Karasti 2000, publication IV). Thus, I have come to argue for an intentional integration and constructive combination of emic and etic views and knowledges. Reconstructing understandings of work to conform with the actual practice requires multiple partial knowledges to be voiced as well as analytic, evaluative and envisioning perspectives to be embraced as a part of practical design activities. Further­more, such a process may necessitate contesting existing views and assumptions and therefore demands a preparedness to get involved in co-learning to reformulate understand­ings. The following section discusses how the exploration of emic-etic views can be seen to extend the expertise in work practice based system design.