Seeing what is invisible in plain sight

Going from product design to strategy, corporate anthropologists are requested to provide grounded statements not only on the present , what is happening here, but also on how we expect these things to evolve in the future. However I share Brigitte Jordan's opinion that predicting the future is not a reasonable task and that the best we can do is to "look at insidient trends, focus on developments under our noses".

This requires to adopt a focus in sight which is unfamiliar to ethnographers and work analysts, trained in working on the details on the present situations and not to get the dynamic, future-oriented picture. Of course, ethnomethodologists demonstrated how staging the details of our everyday interactions could help us describe the organizing model of our social rituals. Ergonomists from the French-speaking tradition of work analysis also hightlighted how the small events at the workplace inherited and reflected all bigger corporate contradictions. But practically, seeing what is invisible in plain sight requires first to step out of the situation. Grasping the general trends which everybody could see supposes a kind of revolution of the eye: looking carefully, at the details - but through the magnifying glass, with a stranger's eye. This indirect condition - the magnifying glass - may allow us then, as Gaston Leroux's hero Rouletabille, to see

"tout ce que nous ne voyons pas et qui est immense"

  all that we do not see and which is immense...

mobile.migrant.communities. Postcards from the field

Remember I told you we were experimenting with small ideas to keep our internal partners in the loop of our field research as early as possible.

This includes designing the space of the research with their inputs (thanks to individual interviews and comments on the work in progress on collaboration tools at the beginning of the project), and later associating them to our first analyses in workshops and revising our reports with their feedbacks. But to bridge the temporal gap between the participatory definition of the project at the beginning and the discussions on its impacts at the end, we try to give them a sense of what is the core of our work according to us : what is happening on the field.

This year we called this attempt "postcards from the field" (maybe because the fieldwork is to be done during the Summer holidays). Here is one :

The postcard from the field is a under 2 minutes view of a striking fact from our field observations. One is done for each user. It communicates something that the ethnographer has felt to be important to keep in mind after this observation and interview. It is mainly visual, with most of the time a picture, a user quote and a comment in one or two sentences. I may post some more on this blog if you want to stay in the loop too...

mobile.migrant.communities. Food and beverage, or "take a candy and relax"

Take a close look at these desks (both from software engineers, but I guess the result would be the same for almost all kinds of desk workers).

Cookies.Apple.Water.

Coke. Empty cup. Empty cup. Water.

Food and beverage are workers' usual companions. According to our first observations on a collection of desks, this looks like a strong result. Working involves some kind of comfort and safety to which food and beverage constantly contribute. They are comforting. They have a social role (the morning coffee or tea and chit chat at the coffee machine). They can even be used as regulation tools for our own behaviour : think again of the coffee or tea cup as a ritual to enter into our own working space. And sometimes, they are even tools to regulate social relations. See below:

  "Take a candy and relax". It is the welcoming message from this support team, used to deal with frustrated and impatient clients-colleagues whose system does not work any more.

Conclusion : we do not know what the future of the workplace will be like, but we can bet that food and beverage will be part of it.

mobile.migrant.communities How professionals migrate from one work environment to another ?

"I am an anthropologist by training. I have worked in Europe, the United States, and a number of developing countries, tracing the influence of social and technological innovations on work practice, quality of life and organizational change. For the last 15 years or so, with my colleagues at XEROX Parc and the Institute for Research on Learning, I've studied how people learn at work as they take on new technologies, new organizational structures, new management ideas and incorporate them into their working lives. As applied anthropologists and system designers, we used to go into a workplace and observe the local culture, its formal and informal aspects, what people say as well as what they do. We called those studies "workscapes studies" because we came out to understand that work is not simply a set of specified tasks to be carried out as instructed, but much more like an arena, a territory that needs to be traversed and explored, with well-trodden paths and unknown caves ; with teams to be formed and mountains to be scaled. Like landscapes, workscapes have histories and are constantly exposed to the force of the elements, to seasonal fluctuations, and to human actions. We studied how these workscapes cahnges by spending time with people in their worksplaces, as attentive observers and inquisitive participants.

But then something strange happened. The workplace went away.  Managers were not to be found in their corner office. Employees were somewhere other than the sales pit or the team meeting room. At the same time, jobs were going away. Corporate hierarchies became flatter. Workers all of a sudden needed to make decisions on their own rather than following orders from above. (...) While jobs were going away, there was plenty of work to be done. People in the US, and especially in fast-paced Silicon Valley, worked more hours than ever before. As a matter of fact, the boundaries between what is work and what is home life are blurring for many people. If you read email before your morning shower, send a fax before going to work, and get pages during your vacation for an urgent customer problem, where is the boundary ? It became clear that if we wanted to understand how people learn, change and adjust to the new technology-rich world, we would want to go beyond the evanescent workplace." 

From Brigitte Jordan, from PARC and IRL. 

With increasing technologization and increase of knowledge work, it has finally become possible to divorce much work from the workplace, be that of a factory floor, an office or an on-site meeting room. People now work at home, at secondary workplaces, in the car, in trains, in airplanes, on vacation, in coffee shops and shared working spaces. However they still can not work anytime, anywhere. Working requires a specific working environment, including (not exhaustively) space, data, social relationships, technological ressources, mood and also most importantly comfort with food and bevarages, music, and a sufficiently safe and inspiring atmosphere. What makes an environment a working environment? What are these working environments made off ? How are they actively built and transformed by the practitionners ? How do professionals transform some places (and which) into temporary or regular working environments ?  How do they transit, migrate from one to the other ? How do they anticipate and prepare these transitions ? Which factors regulate these migrations ? In short : what is a modern working environment and how is it actively managed by the professionals ? 

This is the focus of this exploratory ethnographic study into the everyday reality of these mobile professionals. This study is done in partnership with the Master of Design and Ethnography from Dundee University.

This is a fast-paced research project : 4 months, including focus phase, two months of fieldwork, one work of analysis with our partners. The field research is just beginning, we are in the process of building the research protocol. As usual, I realize that formalizing a shared transcript format is an indirect way to discuss and agree on a protocol. More to come on this research anyway...