Resumen de Use of skill acquisition theory to understand novice to expert development in design ethnography
Ibrahim Mohedas, Shanna R. Daly, Kathleen H. Sienko
The design processes engineers use to develop artifacts have a significant effect on the utility and impact these artifacts haveon society. Traditional design processes are technology-centric, focusing on the artifact being developed with less emphasison the context, culture, and people for whom they are developed. Human-centered design processes, however, strive toplace the humans who will interact with the artifact at the center of the design process. These processes require a deepunderstanding of the stakeholders and a product’s context of use. One method for obtaining this deep level ofunderstanding is design ethnography, a set of methods derived from research methods developed within social scienceand used to understand participants preferences and context of use. To date, the limited research on design ethnographyeducation has demonstrated that there is a significant gap between what novices can produce in their use of designethnography and what is reported in the literature on the use of design ethnography within industry. In this paper weinterpret the findings of design ethnography studies (of both novices and experts) through the lens of the Dreyfus andDreyfus model of skill acquisition. We demonstrate how this theory of skill acquisition explains specific results found in theliteratureand the challenge ofdeveloping designethnographyas a skill.We also discussthe pedagogicalimplicationsof thismodel of design ethnography learning and consider Kolb’s theory of learning as it applies to the development of students asdesign ethnographers.
