Title: Indians studying German users: a reversal of gaze, or is it really?

Author: Salil Sayed, Turkka Keinonen

Presented at: Indian Anthropology Congress 2019: Anthropology for Developing India: Pathways to Policy Planning and Implementation

Date: 22nd February 2019

Abstract:

With the development of large information technology companies teams of Indian experts get to work on multi-national projects that take them to strange places. The case presented here involves a team of software developers that were assigned a job to design an interface used by field technicians in Germany to keep track of vehicle tyres that are replaced under warranty. These team members trained in the emergent skill-sets of usability research and interface design ended up doing ethnographic fieldwork without any formal training in anthropology. This kind of fieldwork often called as quick and dirty ethnography is justified within industry based on the resource and time constraints of industrial projects. They are none the less expected to provide actionable insights for design process and decision making based on a handful of interviews and a few hours of observation in context.

For an academic anthropologist these kind of interventions raise interesting questions related to those that haunted anthropology since its beginning. Prima facie we see the Indian researcher observing the German worker. At a closer look we see an elaborate organisational framework that is put in place using various paper contracts and verbal agreements that make this interaction possible within a very narrow time framework. It also requires constant communication within the hierarchies of the involved organisations for its performance. In a sort of postmortem study, the author analysed the archives of this communication and the artefacts created during the project, and interviewed the team members who are now working in different companies. The analysis reveals the complex nature of this phenomenon that is inherent in the development of emerging economies participating in global trade. This paper argues for a reconsideration of the 'gaze' and subject/object relationship that analysis of such contexts allow us.