Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 262

As theories, these models provide a way to summarize behavior. That is, they
provide a way to organize the results we have obtained about how people behave
in groups into a single representation. The results can be used in system design and
also as agents in video games and simulations. As theories they also provide
suggestions about what we do not know and what we would like to know. As a
simple example, some of these models work with small groups, but not with large
groups. This difference suggests questions about how small and large groups work
in different ways.
We start here with descriptive theories that describe in declarative terms the
structures and relationships of groups. A more complex model is a model that
describes not only the structures but also how the structures are created and how
they interact. We also describe two approaches to creating these models, the Soft
Systems Methodology and Rich Pictures.
9.4.2 Descriptive Social Models
Descriptive models provide a description of the components of interest. These can
be grouped into static and dynamic models. Both of these have been seen earlier in
this chapter in the descriptions of networks.
9.4.2.1 Ethnographic Descriptions of Social Processes
Ethnography is studying the users in their environments, including the physical
location and objects, who and what they interact with and how, why, and when,
and what they think their interactions mean. Ethnography provides a way to
summarize and discover how social factors interact with systems. This approach
thus provides a way to reduce risks to systems because it helps the designer
understand the context of how the system will be used. It is also really important to
conduct observations of people in their normal settings because it reminds us that
not all users are like us. Notably, many Internet companies have experienced
failures in developing social experiences because they have not taken their users'
perspectives into account (Churchill 2010 ). Ethnographic studies can be started by
reading about the culture of your users (e.g., military biographies if your users are
in the military, about astronauts if they are astronauts, and about insurance claim
adjusters if they are insurance claim adjusters). This work can also involve
watching users do their work, or even participating in it (e.g., Coleman 1974
studied ditch digging, restaurants, and garbage men; Suchman 1983 studied office
work; see also Crabtree 2003 ; Plowman et al. 1995 ; Viller and Sommerville 2000 ).
The take-away message here is that you need to study the social situation more the
further it is from your own background.