Ethnography!

Ethnography is used across all different disciplines and fields like in education, anthropology, social work, psychology, usability and is very important in designing. Designers have to also be ethnographers and observe people’s needs, as they design for people and not for themselves. In order to understand a person’s needs, you have to do a bit of snooping like we did in our previous assignment. Other than snooping, you have to also interact with people, speak to them, listen to them, carry out researches and most importantly be broad with your research subjects and don’t just consider a certain group of people as being enough to understand people’s everyday actions, habits, behaviors and feelings. In order to design something useful, or actually you might even have to design a monument (sculpture) which is not useful at all but has to be appreciated by the public, you need to broaden your mind and try to think like other people and understand what they see as good design or what is appealing to them.

The same kind of methods are used at school too. Teachers observe their classes, get to learn their students, their behaviors, their weaknesses and strengths, their needs and after they have done all that they plan their teaching program. As strange as it sounds, ethnography is used in religion too. For example, a Priest has to engage with the public, talk to the people that go to Church but also to people that don’t see how they feel after Mass, their needs, their fears, their problems, and know that everything is modernized and the people have changed. The Church adapts to fit in with the way people live, behave and think nowadays, although beliefs and religion doesn’t change, people do. Priests use the same kind of methods to proclaim the love of Christ to those who think that there is no absolute truth. Ethnography goes all the way back to (Act 17) when Apostle Paul observed the people of Athens and he became concerned about their spiritual condition. After learning more about the Athenians and their idolatry and asking them questions in order to understand how they thought, he suitably illustrated and applied the message of the Gospel.

Now we can understand how relevant ethnography is for everyone, and use it in our daily lives to design, teach and a lot of other stuff that you wouldn’t even imagine it playing a very important role in.