Tasarıma esin kaynağı olan etnografik anlatılara davet: Bir tasarım araştırma yöntemi

In user-centered design, everyday lives of users, their practices, thoughts and feelings are important sources of information and inspiration for designers. In order to obtain this information, designers and design researchers utilize ethnographic methods that enable them to observe, talk to, and understand users in order to incorporate their views in evaluating design solutions. These ethnographic methods involve the collection of information about the material products, social relationships, beliefs and values of a community. The obtained ethnographic data can be visual, such as, photographs and video records, and/or verbal, such as, notes, transcriptions of conversations and interviews. Among these different kinds of data, this dissertation explores the verbal sources, in particular, conversations, focusing on the generation and use of ethnographic narratives as a source of inspiration for design. Ethnographic narratives that are obtained through the transcriptions of interviews or conversations, provide opportunities to learn about people's elicited narratives and representations of their social worlds, including beliefs, ideologies, justifications, motivations, and aspirations. These are generated through ethnographic conversations, which are produced and performed in accordance with socially shared conventions including clues for understanding everyday life of their narrators. Through these narratives, researchers can learn about secret histories, internal power struggles, and unofficial customs, as informants can sometimes be eloquent commentators about their cultures. This dissertation aims to identify the relevant information in ethnographic narratives from which designers can make use of, and propose designers a systematic way of utilizing this information for design. From a broader perspective, it aims to describe 'an ethnography of possibilities' for design, which keeps the essential principals of ethnography but deviates from its traditional understanding of describing what is by rather inviting conversations of what is possible so that designers and design researchers can elicit design-relevant information while preserving the conceptions of users. The key issues that are investigated throughout this study are the contents in ethnographic narratives, which are interesting and/or useful for designers to stimulate design ideas and the ways designers make sense of these narrative contents and utilize them for generating ideas. To do this, empirical studies with users, designers and design students were conducted. The outcomes of these studies were then analyzed using qualitative content analysis method. The empirical study started with the Preliminary Study, which was conducted with a limited number of users by using the cultural probes method in order to generate user data. These data were then communicated to designers and design students, separately, to explore how they were utilized in terms of design. The findings from this Preliminary Study revealed that designers and design students similarly utilized user data mostly in the form of narratives which were about situations that evoke positive emotions related to lifestyle; problematic experiences related to the situated practices; and, expectations and possible responses towards innovation. This information provided insight on what kind of user narratives are mostly utilized by designers and contributed to the question formulation for the ethnographic research conducted in the Main Study. The main empirical study was completed in two stages: In the first stage of the Main Study, conversations with users were conducted. These users were members of virtual communities and thus, all conversations were online. Along with the findings from the Preliminary Study, a set of questions was formulated addressing the issues that can provide useful information for design. These questions were asked to users during the conversations that were participated. Here, it was found that joining virtual communities in their ongoing conversations with this specific set of questions and without manipulating or disturbing the natural flow of these conversations enabled eliciting design-relevant information while gaining important insight for understanding the members of these communities. In the second stage of the Main Study, these conversations were transcribed into ethnographic narratives and communicated to designers and design students, separately. They were instructed to read these user narratives and highlight the parts, which they find surprising, interesting and/or stimulating in terms of design and idea generation. In the study with designers, each designer completed this process individually and was interviewed at the end of the process. In the study with design students, the students went through the narratives individually but worked in groups during idea generation where conversations took place. Thus, the outcomes of both processes were mainly verbal and textual. These outcomes were subject of a qualitative content analysis where contingency analysis was utilized as preliminary analysis and followed by an elaborate qualitative content analysis. Through these analyses and the interpretation of their outcomes, certain contents in these ethnographic narratives were identified, which were found most useful and design-relevant. Moreover, it was determined how the co-occurrences of these contents were utilized in terms of design. Overall, the findings of this dissertation led to the development of a specific design research method, which focuses on generating ethnographic narratives through conversations with users and utilizing these narratives to inspire different design implications. The method and findings of this dissertation proposes a projection of the use of ethnographies of possibilities into other areas of design, for different stages of designs, and other approaches of design. The developed method offers design researchers, designers and design students a systematic way to generate ethnographic conversations and utilize them for design.