First Author | CHI 2024
Tejaswini Joshi, Heidi Biggs, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell
Background
This paper began with a deceptively simple question: How do we write the researcher into the research?
Ethnographic research in HCI often emphasizes participant experiences, yet remains silent about the researcher’s own role in shaping those accounts. Drawing from my fieldwork with small-scale sustainable farms in Indiana, I explored what it means to center the researcher’s subjectivity — not as a bias to be eliminated, but as a generative force in knowledge production.
Contributions
We introduced the concept of the "gossamer wall" (after Andrea Doucet) as a way to understand the reflexive boundaries researchers navigate — between themselves, their participants, and their epistemic communities.
Through narrative vignettes (or "impressionist tales"), we showed how acknowledging the emotional, relational, and situated aspects of fieldwork can lead to richer, more ethically attuned design research. We argued for a more unapologetically subjective practice of ethnography in HCI — one that recognizes researchers as full human beings in the process of making meaning.
Methods
-
Interpretive ethnography
-
Reflexive writing
-
Narrative inquiry / impressionist tales
-
Thematic reflection on positionality
Why it Matters
This work helped articulate the philosophical ground I now stand on in all my UX research:
-
Reflexivity is not optional. It is an essential part of qualitative research methods.
-
The researcher is not a neutral observer but an active meaning-maker.
-
Writing itself is a site of epistemic labor and ethical decision-making.
This paper laid the foundation for my dissertation and shaped my approach to emotional UX, inclusive design, and research-to-strategy translation in both academic and applied contexts.
Business Impact and Translation
This work informs how I approach UX research in applied settings:
-
Supports inclusive and ethical design by foregrounding researcher awareness and cultural context
-
Improves research rigor by making reflexivity part of the method, not a flaw to hide
-
Strengthens team alignment by offering narrative tools that make researcher insights more transparent, relatable, and emotionally resonant
-
Bridges academic insight with design practice, enabling deeper understanding of user needs beyond surface behaviors
In practice, this means I bring a research lens that surfaces hidden assumptions, emotional undercurrents, and systemic forces, translating complex realities into design opportunities with empathy and clarity