As someone who has conducted research for a company, I really appreciated this piece. More often than not, short-term ethnography can be extremely helpful in providing context, building empathy, and in/validating your assumptions. There are, indeed, efficient ways to accomplish long-term benefits not through shortcuts, but through “contemporary renderings of anthropological ethnography” by “doing research with rather than about participants” (pg. 359).
I can also relate to accomplishing an “intensity of data” through “video observations of activity, which are closely analyzed” (pg. 353), having recorded users’ voice, face, as well as tracking their eye movement (with permission of course!). Even though we are not studying 1000s users over the span of several years, we obtain vast amounts of data by tracking things like participant’s eye movement on the web page to learn more about things they notice, that draw their attention, or that they actually read vs. glance. This allows us to break down and analyze patterns in order to build more compelling products.
I really liked how Pink and Morgan’s summarized the complexity of ethnography. How our experiences, subjectivity, and ways of knowing impact our fieldwork and the life-long benefits of conducting this type of research:
“The sets of encounters through which ethnographic knowledge/knowing emerges are qualitatively different, their development is rapid, and intense, and will grow in different ways as encountered by different people, arguments and ways of knowing long beyond the life of the fieldwork itself.” (pg. 354)
Generally, ethnography is incredibly interesting and, I believe, makes us better humans. We don’t have to have PhD’s to learn how to observe and empathize with others, but we do have to be mindful, observant, and open to accepting the fact that we do not know what we don’t know.