Design ethnography brings together the theory, methods and intervention of ethnography and design to create an approach that draws on both practices. It is an approach to research, insight generation and intervention that involves our collaborative engagement with both participants and stakeholders in the knowledge and interventions that these encounters produce. With participants, it involves using conventional methods of ethnographic interviewing and hanging around in people’s lives, following them as they go about their everyday activities, talking with them about their experiences and feelings in the present and their imagined futures. We also video and audio record these encounters to create ways of remembering, sharing and enriching these moments through the research, intervention and dissemination processes. These processes also involve working with participants and stakeholders in design futures workshops, to co-create knowledge, imagine future technologies and to co-develop their prototypes.
Design Ethnographic Living Labs for Future Urban Mobility
