Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

words Rick Poynor

Video ethnography has been called reality TV for the boardroom. The researchers who wield the cameras are masters of the ambivalent art of people watching. Their images reveal secrets of our behaviour we don’t even know about ourselves.The video ethnographers’ findings are gold dust to their clients and video ethnography has become one of the fashionable research techniques that any forward-looking design company now offers. The technology of close-up, real-time observation, using lightweight digital equipment, plays an increasingly significant role in the design process. If you want to find out about the people who will use a product or service, or to explore the potential for creating new products, call in a video ethnographer to film your subjects where they live or work.

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Despite the new rhetoric of empathy and inclusiveness, of involving the user and understanding people’s needs, the person pointing the camera still occupies a position of authority in relation to the subject. This is no less real just because it is concealed beneath a soft blanket of warm feeling. When the research outcome is sociallybeneficial, as it is in healthcare, few would find any reason to object to the technique. The problem lies in the very 21st-century confusion between understanding people better to help them and understanding them better to manipulate their behaviour as consumers.

[From Video ethnography | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE]