Technography

Technography is the ethnographic description of technology-in-use: how tools, machines, and systems are actually handled, skilled, and enacted in the course of real tasks. Articulated as a method by Kees Jansen and Sietze Vellema in the Wageningen tradition of agrarian and development studies, it places the technical at the centre of ethnographic attention, asking how people and artefacts together accomplish work. A digital strand, exemplified by Taina Bucher's study of algorithmic power, extends technography to software and platforms, examining how algorithms are encountered, felt, and acted upon. Across both, the method treats technology not as a finished object but as something performed in practice within particular social and material settings.