Use of ethnography to acquire an insider's view of engineering design teams

This paper is based on the findings of an EPSRC funded research project which has carried out longitudinal ethnographic studies of engineering design teams in the electronics industry. The first aim of the project was to improve the understanding of the tacit social processes which enable design teams to work effectively. The second aim was to use such understanding in the analysis and design of a socio-technical system to support the work of design teams. In this way the work has been conducted very much from the pragmatic perspective of human-centred systems design rather than the disinterested perspective of the anthropologist. The aim of this paper is to indicate the nature of the contribution made by a longitudinal ethnographic study to the design of the socio-technical system within which engineering design teams work.