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Dr Rachel Jones reports on the recent Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference EPIC 2006, which was held at Intel in Portland, Oregon.

The conference is certainly becoming more established. Over 300 people attended this year, many from Europe, and the event was truly multi-disciplinary with participants from anthropology, design, HCI, and social science backgrounds, and working across academia, corporations and consultancies. The two days were broken down into 3 half-day paper sessions and an afternoon of workshops. The papers seemed split between what Melissa Cefkin from IBM called in her session, "what's going on out there" and "what's going on in here"; in other words, papers reporting on studies, and papers about what we do and how we do it. The study papers spanned many areas such as pharmaceutical, finance, the online world, mobility, emerging markets and technologies in the home.
Many of the papers about ethnography practice itself seemed to focus on representation and forms of communication. For example a paper from Intel by Suzanne Thomas and Tony Salvador indicated that in emerging markets we need to develop representations that go beyond the focus on the individual, as in personas, and represent relationships. Nina Wakeford from Surrey University spoke about the role of PowerPoint presentations in conveying the findings from fieldwork. I spoke about the need to develop experience models to make the effective transition from ethnographic studies into design solutions.
Last year there seemed to be an emphasis on the importance of developing and reflecting on theory, whereas this year there seemed to be a strange tension between whether or not you were an anthropologist and brought that training to bear on studies. If we are going to build on and develop theory, our roots need to come from somewhere and anthropology is the obvious discipline. However, the impact was to make some participants feel detached from the community. I hope it is simply part of EPIC finding its place because we need participants from different disciplines to contribute to theory and continue to develop our practice.
I found very little discussion about ethnography's contribution to organisations, whether that is in areas such as design, branding or organisational change. A panel curated by Tracey Lovejoy from Microsoft and involving Genevieve Bell from Intel, Jeanette Blomberg from IBM, Tim Malefyt from BBDO, and Rick Robinson founder of E-lab, discussed the success of ethnography in business settings. The discussion seemed to focus on whether ethnography had become established in the industry. My sense is that it will only become established when its contribution to industry is clear and we have yet to convince many.
Having curated one of the half-day sessions at EPIC this year and written two papers I realise how difficult it is for practitioners to spare the focussed time needed to become involved. Yet these events are a great way of developing the field, meeting fellow practitioners, learning about a new area or new techniques and approaches. As a member of the steering committee for EPIC 2007, I am interested in ways we can involve practitioners who only have time to make a lightweight contribution whilst still retaining the quality and usefulness of that contribution. Your ideas are welcome.