There are always wars of disciplines. This didn’t start today with the war between UX Design, Customer Experience, Service Design, etc. Back in the day, some guy named Gerhard Friedrich Müller decided that it was important to separate Ethnography from Anthropology. He called it Völker-Beschreibung in German, which we could translate literally as “the description of populations”. As mentioned on Wikipedia: “This became known as ‘ethnography,’ following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin and the German variant by A. F. Thilo in 1767.”

Okay, this sounds historically amazing, but what the fuck is ethnography about? In my simple words, I would say that Ethnography studies how people behave within specific cultures. Okay, now do you start to see the link between all these fields and Service Design? They all have a focus on the human. Before, with ergonomics, the focus was on the interaction between humans and their objects. And now with ethnography, we are interested in the cultures of these funny animals whom we call humans.

More practically, Service Design borrows methods and ways of thinking from ethnography. The ethnographers believe it is extremely important to observe society from the point of view of the people they want to study. Today, Service Designers do exactly the same thing. They don’t start creating services based solely on their inspiration. They want to understand the people that these services will affect.

Therefore, observation of users is one of the key methods at the early stages of the problem definition of a new service or for the improvement of an existing service.

Ethnography can be seen as a qualitative research approach. In opposition to quantitative research, qualitative research takes a non-numerical approach. It is not focused solely on things you can measure. It also looks at what you can observe but not quantify. In the world of Service Design, we often say that quantitative research tells us what people do (trends) while qualitative research describes why (deep reasons) people do these things.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.