Traditionally, ethnography refers to long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out by anthropologists in non-western societies. By taking part and emerging themselves in social practices, anthropologists would carry out participant observation of everyday contexts in order to describe and analyse patterns of culture such as beliefs and values among particular peoples. Nowadays, ethnographic fieldwork is still a cornerstone in qualitative research aiming at in-depth and detailed descriptions of life from the people being studied. Yet, the term ‘ethnography’ has also proven a fluid one; one that has come to adapt to various kinds of social studies and new types of methodology (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007) and where fieldwork is not merely about exhausting descriptions of complex totalities of a comparable order (Faubion, 2009). This study is a case in point. On one hand, it carries out ethnography and aims at thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) and profound understandings of the relationships between participants in a Design Thinking process, but on the other, it does not seek to uncover aspects of everyday life. Instead, it seeks intervention by disturbing and pushing participants and processes in controlled environments, i.e. workshops.

This research explores workshops as places for ethnographic inquiry and adds to the dialogue of using unconventional field sites and to the discussion about valid knowledge production (see Akama, Pink, & Sumartojo, 2018, p. 13). To do so, it uses a Design Thinking process in a rural community in the Northern part of Denmark. Here twenty-one participants; teachers, parents, members of local organisations (i.e. sports organisations, scouts), representatives from the local parochial church council, the local community guild as well as pedagogues, social workers, healthcare professionals and educational consultants took part in three workshops in order to cooperate and propose how to tie the community closer together and improve conditions for families with children.

The study builds on previous work (Jönsson & Padovan-Özdemir, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c) and is theoretically informed by design anthropology (Akama, Pink, & Sumartojo, 2018; Gunn & Donovan, 2012; Muller, 2003; Pink, 2014; Smith et al., 2016). Design anthropology focuses on dynamic processes of cultural production and reproduction. The main point being that these processes are studied while emerging through intervention and experimentation (Smith & Otto, 2016). Following this, this study investigates workshops as places where people, technologies and materialities interact and are experimented with.

The research questions are:

How do workshops qualify as places for empirical inquiry? What is the role of the researcher? What type of knowledge is produced?

Workshops come in many shapes and sizes. Commonly, they are meetings where people discuss and carry out discussions and activities on a particular subject. This research explores the use of workshops as places for ethnographic inquiry through Design Thinking as proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school). Design Thinking is a design methodology that is useful when dealing with complex problems and, thus, applicable in studies that are multifaceted and include stakeholders with very different agendas. In short, researchers took twenty-one participants through phases of empathising with and understanding the human need (phase 1), defining the problem (phase 2) before ideating and coming up with ideas to solve the problem (phase 3). These three phases were followed by prototyping (phase 4) and a final phase of testing (phase 5). The research took place at a local school in a small rural community. Prior to the Design Thinking process, researchers collected local information (the municipal plan; school policies; websites with local news and/or activities) and had informal meetings with the head teacher and an educational consultant from the municipality. This provided valuable data for the study’s initial design and workshops. The two local representatives also served as the main recruiters of the twenty-one participants from/in the local area. The Design Thinking process was designed as three workshops over a period of two months. The three workshops covered the first four Design Thinking phases. One team of researchers (2) was in charge of workshops and facilitated the design process. Another team of researchers (3) carried out participant observation as well as collected the mappings, drawings and illustrations produced on the sessions. Field notes and initial analytical processing between workshops informed the content and progress in the design process. It also framed the twenty-one semi-structured interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008) with participants between workshop 1 and 2 and the four focus group interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008) after workshop 3. These interviews also provided feedback to the workshops and prepared the participants for the final phase of testing solutions in practice.

The research explores how workshops qualify as places for ethnographic inquiry. This was done by the use of a Design Thinking process in a small rural community where diverse actors came together in order to design new solutions to tie the community together and improve conditions for families with children. The research shows that workshops provided an ethnographic field that enabled researchers to capture social processes as they unfolded between people, technologies and materialities. The study demonstrated how workshops are dense spaces that allows for detailed descriptions. However, the research also showed how workshops must be relevant and that continuous data about the design process as well as thorough feedback from participants are necessary. Therefore, supplementary methods may be applied. Indeed, documents and interviews were peril to this study’s workshop design, progress and methodology. The research also shows that workshops necessitated a very active role for researchers. As opposed to traditional fieldwork, the researchers defined and invented the ethnographic field, a sort of ‘third space’ (Muller, 2003), by providing a detailed framework for the design process and workshops. Researchers became agents of change, that is, researchers who actively support participants in their efforts to develop and transform. From the above it follows, that workshops as places for ethnographic inquiry contribute with a very different knowledge production than found in traditional long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Rather than uncovering everyday life in the past and present, workshops hold the possibility to shed light on how knowledge is generated in and through action. Imbued with intervention, workshops provide data about social processes as they unfold in a designed space as well as ideas and wishes for the future. This raises interesting and important discussions about methodology and ethics and adds to the current dialogue about what ethnography is - and what it ought to do.

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