For me, one of the multiple benefits of #EpicEurope event has been the necessity of a virtuous middle point between two extremes:

1. On one extreme, there is ethnography academically pure – academical deadlines and timing, fundamentalistic and obsessive approach to ethics (a good recipe for fieldwork paralysis and door closing), not to mention a problem which shouldn’t be: publishing of results. Somehow, the impossibility of publishing the results of a research made for a client is assimilated to an ultimate damage to the informants. Besides, although you cannot conduct a proper ethnography in 48 hours, it’s up to us to offer the richest possible result inside the deadlines of the customer. And although a deonthological / ethical code should be mandatory, we work with people and thus common sense would be mandatory too. If ethics code is not an obstacle for other professions related with people, it shouldn’t be for us too. Note: It is needed to mention that this extreme is much more European than American.
2. On the other extreme, there is the new trendy-cool character of ethnography. Ethnography is growing as a demanded service for European companies and corporations. As this awareness and desirability is growing, more and more professionals not related with ethnography are tempted to offer it nevertheless, shortcutting with a snap what costs years to adquire. Shortcutting: don’t respect at all ethnographical timing, don’t use properly our pool of tools and strategies when conducting fieldwork, in order to return with rich results and insights, properly rooted with the reality which is meaningful to the customer. Without proper training and experience, the only resource is to disguise camera-supported interviews and in-company interviews as pure and hardcore ethnography.

For us, ethnography is a medium, OUR medium, for providing our customers with the results that they are looking for. It is not an end by itself, and it should adapt to the needings and restrictions of every project. But that doesn’t mean that all is right and that everybody can conduct ethnography. I’m not talking necessarily about academical titles, but about actual training and showable experience: ethnography maximizes surprise, emergency, direct contact with reality which matters to our customers. In order to obtain all that results, ethnography tax is mandatory: timing, being at the field as a seasoned ethnographer and delete as possible the distance with the protagonists of our job.

Middle virtuous point is not an idealistic entelechy. It is something real, born from experience and from the necessities of every project. If we want our customers to be satisfied with our results, if we want actionable results that matters, we have to adapt to their timing and necessities, yes, but without surrendering our techniques and fortitudes – our customers don’t demand us to do that, after all.

Middle virtuous point is totally opposed to a zero-sum game. Although not everybody can believe this, it is not needed to choose between talibanesque academy or whateversian amateurism. The only thing that matters – and we know the recipy for that – is that the customer will end satisfied with the result of his investment in ethnography, and that the result of ethnography will be self-explanaible and actionable as much as possible.

Or, as Horatio said, “In medio stat virtus, quando extrema sunt vitiosa” (in the middle point stays the virtue, when the extremes are vicious).

In order to introduce #EPICEurope event, we could say that the awareness that EPIC has raised about ethnographic services at companies and corporation has been translated into a single event which is centered on specific European problems and opportunities related with ethnography. Time ago, some EPIC veterans (including Catriona Macaulay, Joan Vinyets and Heinrich Schwarz, between others) concluded that it would be very compelling and fertile to launch an event that, with the EPIC spirit, would be centered on the practices and evolution of applied and industrial ethnography in Europe.

And they were totally right, of course.

Soon after arriving to the event (which took place on ELISAVA School of Design, a very adecuate environment for it), I realized that my previous experiences were quite far from what I was experiencing then. The majority of the encounters and meetings that I have assisted were of anthropologists and for anthropologists or, at most, shared with our cousins the sociologists. In this case, we anthropologists were a slight relative majority. It was refreshing to perceive the increasing interest of other specialists in ethnography.

As if that were not enough, EPIC focuses on the impact of corporate ethnography, on what our passion brings to different needs of our customers.

I was not ready to stop feeling alone in a couple of minutes. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening your colleagues talk about problems like yours which find creative solutions, or to hear stories like yours of knocking on cold doors once and again until ethnography enters and begin to add unique results to customers.

After a evening for breaking the ice for some of us, the main event was a very demanding one-day session in with we covered three main topics combining panels with distributed conversations. After creating 4 temporal groups, we went to classrooms. There, a facilitator launch us a simple script for organizing the topic into a short list of questions in which discussions were based. We shared the results of the discussions and returned with it to the main auditorium for share it again with the entire EPIC assistants.

Topics are well covered in experientia’s blog, for instance.

All the results were organized into a Prezi presentation, which I will repost as soon as I know that it is published.

My strongest feeling was of ending an era and the beginning of a new one: the end of crossing the desert and the arrive to fertile lands for us European industrial ethnographers. Although applied ethnography is less implanted than in America, although a lot of achievements are yet needed, time has come for industrial ethnography in Europe as a wide demanded research service. It was even more convinced that the ball is on our roof, that it is up to us that our customers identified clearly what is not ethnography (“I record interviews with a camera on the users’ living room”) and how to distinguish it from what us anthropologist and properly trained practitioners do with our tool set, our being in the field, our obsession for context and our relationship with informants.

The next day, as a conclusion, we unanimously decided to give continuity to this first effort and repeat this European EPIC encounters. It has been a unique experience to discover the many problems and opportunities we German, French, Spanish, Italian ethnographers share… it was the opposite situation of the classical joke of national stereotypes.

Next year, in a sunny place!

¿Y cuál es el grado de detalle deseable? ¿En qué debe consistir un cuaderno de campo? ¿Debemos describir con precisión todo lo que ocurra durante el trabajo de campo? ¿Debemos incluir nuestras impresiones particulares? ¿Necesitamos anotar datos personales de nuestros informantes? Sería fácil decir que sí a todo, pero creo que será mejor no dar por supuesto el razonamiento que nos lleva a esa conclusión y matizarla adecuadamente.

Un cuaderno de campo es un instrumento extraordinariamente flexible. En cierto sentido, la elaboración de cada registro refleja la actitud y la posición en el trabajo de campo y, especialmente, hacia dónde gravitaba su atención. Y, por supuesto, la evolución del cuaderno en su conjunto nos permite ver la evolución de la misma investigación, cómo anotaciones que en un primer momento parecían carecer de importancia se tornan imprescindibles cuando la investigación ya está más avanzada. Nunca se puede predecir cuándo nace el modelo analítico o la teoría de la investigación, pero sí de dónde: del cuaderno de campo.

Los primeros registros del cuaderno de campo de una investigación deben ser hiperdetallistas: todavía no sabemos qué dato será relevante para la investigación; por tanto, toda información es valiosa a priori. Luego, determinados detalles comenzarán a ser prescindibles, al constatarse su falta de relevancia para la investigación. Conforme la investigación avanza, el cuaderno comenzará a trufarse de hipótesis y pequeñas incursiones analíticas que, de confirmarse como válidas, constituirán un gran avance de cara a los resultados finales de la investigación. Esa es la belleza del cuaderno de campo. Te acompaña durante toda la investigación, te permite afrontar cada nueva sesión de trabajo de campo con más seguridad que la anterior y te ayuda a dirigir la atención adecuadamente para el cumplimiento de los objetivos últimos de la investigación.