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Paper long abstract

The personal nature of the fieldwork encounter between researcher and research participant has long been hailed as the productive drive of ethnography. Researchers in product and service design projects both in commercial practice and public service increasingly draw on anthropological theory and methods for short-term and long-term fieldwork. Time-pressed commercial projects seek control over the research process often preferring the predictability of professional recruiting and paid research relationships, while others, especially in university-based projects, favor open-ended research processes that rely upon participation as a result of personal interests and mutual accountability. This paper draws on examples from three recent design projects to look critically at the framing of the researcher / research participant encounter in product and service design with special attention to the recruitment, maintenance and termination of research relationships.