Information Systems and Service Design (Fall 2011) UC Berkeley, School of Information

Design contexts range from "experience-intensive" to "information-intensive.” On this continuum "documents" and other information sources go from being incidental or occasional to being ubiquitous and intrinsic to the goals and activities of the stakeholders and actors. Put another way, on the "experience-intensive" side of this continuum the most important things to study are (human) participants, and on the "information-intensive" end we need to pay most attention to the documents. We can learn mostly from "informants" or we can learn mostly from "information." In this first lecture we’ll talk about ethnographic techniques of “contextual inquiry” that emphasize participant observation and interviews to understand behavior and goals in a particular context.