Buttons, Bombs, Books, & Body Cameras: Taking Design Things to the Field

Ethnography has had a profound impact on design as a discipline. Keen to understand the social worlds and realities of those they design for, designers have incorporated ethnographic methods into their research practices (Nova, 2014; Ward, 2015). Despite efforts by social researchers to introduce novel – what perhaps might be referred to as ‘designerly’ – methods to their research practices (Lury and Wakeford, 2012), and the growing interdisciplinary area of design anthropology (Gunn, Otto and Smith, 2013; C Smith et al., 2016), it might be fair to say that in terms of method designers have taken more than they have given. What can ethnographers learn from design? How might we do ethnography in a designerly way? This paper discusses out how ‘Design Things’: a button, a ‘homemade BWC’ which resembles a bomb, and a book, were used as research devices in conjunction with ethnography to understand police use of the technology.