The Role of Ethnographic Research In Driving Technology Innovation - Lessons from Inside Asia
It is mid-afternoon in Malaysia. A devout Muslim stops his work, turns toward Mecca and says a prayer , as he is required to do five times a day. Although he is far from a mosque, he knows exactly where to position himself: his cell phone has an embedded compass that points him in the direction of Mecca.
The Chinese have a practice of burning paper items, typically paper money, during funeral ceremonies, to ensure the dead will have what they need for a good life in the next world. Today they also burn paper versions of cell phones, laptop computers, and flat-panel televisions.
An Indonesian woman considers herself a regular Internet user, although she has never touched a computer. She dictates to her young son the email messages she wants to send. The son enters them into a computer at the local cyber cafe. Later, he checks back to retrieve the reply, which he prints out and brings home to read to his mother.
A woman sits down at a Starbucks store in Seattle, opens her notebook computer and checks her email, while a customer at a nearby table does the same. Halfway around the world, a man takes a seat in a cyber café in Sydney, turns on his notebook computer and is quickly admonished to turn it off by a person standing in line.
As these anecdotes illustrate, the way in which people view and use technology varies substantially across cultures and continents. Understanding the cultural, social, geographic, and other factors that impact technology adoption is essential to Intel and any other company that wants to succeed in developing useful technology products for diverse global markets.
To help Intel gain a deep understanding of how technology is viewed and used by people in different cultures, Intel's People and Practices Research team-comprised of social scientists, designers, and engineers-travels the globe to explore how people in different cultures live and work. In conducting their fieldwork, the team applies a variety of ethnographic and other social science and design research tools and techniques, from in-depth interviews, to story-boarding, participation in activities, and observations of people as they go about their daily routines. The team shares the insights gleaned through fieldwork with Intel's business units, product development groups and strategists, to inform the direction and design of technology products for a variety of global markets.
The work of the People and Practices Research team supplements and complements traditional market research techniques, such as surveys and focus groups. Such techniques can be used to identify trends and describe what people are doing, but not necessarily why. Social scientists and designers dig deeper, exploring people's values, aspirations, desires and motivations. By paying attention to such details, this research helps to makes sense of people's relationships to technology; it puts those relationships into context. This detailed knowledge is essential to designing products that people will want to buy and use.
Insights from Inside Asia
A recent project of the People and Practices Research team focused on understanding daily life in the Asia Pacific region. The Inside Asia project team, led by Dr. Genevieve Bell, spent two years conducting ethnographic research among 100 households in seven Asian countries-India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Australia. The research yielded some important insights into the underlying social and cultural factors that influence technology adoption in the region, and their implications for new technology development.
The Community vs. the Individual: Shared Technology
In the West, and particularly in the U.S., the individual is often considered the most important social unit, and individual ownership of technology is taken for granted. Each person aspires to owning her own PC or laptop, cell phone or iPod.
In many Asian cultures, by contrast, the emphasis is on the community, not the individual, and sharing of technology is commonplace. In many homes in Asia, researchers found that multiple people use the same PC, even in families with enough resources to buy additional computers. Sharing, in these cultures, is viewed as a social good,
For cultures that emphasize sharing, PCs with multicore architecture that could accommodate multiple users at the same time could be useful technology. But other technology that Western developers associate with shared computing may not be required in Asian cultures. In the U.S., if multiple people use the same PC, each user might expect to have his data isolated and protected from other users. But in many Asian cultures, there are different ideas of personal identity and as such, privacy. Multiple people might use the same machine without the need for password protection or biometric identification. However, these sorts of technologies (particularly biometrics) might make more sense in rural and emerging economies where literacy rates are very low but the demand for technology solutions is high.
Infrastructure Barriers to Technology Adoption
In the developed countries of the West, it is assumed that the infrastructure to support a wide range of technology is in place and is reliable. In many parts of Asia, that is not the case. Electrical power may not be accessible in rural regions, or it may be supplied for just a few hours a day. Technology products for these regions require different power management strategies. For example, the ability to dynamically switch between electricity and battery power without any loss of memory is crucial. This capability is available today in notebook computers. If it could be extended to the PC, a more affordable alternative, PCs might be more readily adopted in regions without a sound electrical infrastructure.
In urban areas of Asia, which have easy access to electricity, consumers face a different kind of infrastructure barrier. Most middle-class consumers live in high-rise, high-density apartment buildings. Unlike in the U.S., technology infrastructure is delivered to the buildings, not to individual units. An individual consumer may not be able to order HBO Premium, for example, if the building's managers have decided not to purchase it.
For U.S. technologists, this is a completely different way of thinking about infrastructure. While it may seem limiting, it offers new opportunities as well, including the potential for delivering broadband in new ways. The problem of delivering "last-mile" broadband wireless is transformed from a horizontal to a vertical problem: rather than finding a way to deliver a signal from one house to the next, in urban Asia the problem is to deliver the signal to the building and then determine how to broadcast it vertically for the last half mile.
Rethinking the Concept of Home
The People and Practices Research team has played an important role in Intel's efforts to advance the digital home concept, by helping to identify how people might use computing and communications technologies at home in ways that are very different from their usage in an office environment. As the preceding example suggests, the Inside Asia project has added a new dimension to the research. As Intel looks beyond the U.S. to explore how the digital home might evolve in other cultures, researchers are reexamining some basic assumptions about the meaning of home, including the physical space of the home, its size and shape.
In the U.S., the cultural ideal of "home" is a spacious, free-standing single family dwelling, and the reality for many Americans matches the ideal: the average home in the U.S. has roughly 2,220 square feet of space and six rooms. By contrast, as noted earlier, in urban Asia (with the exception of Australia), most urbanites live, or aspire to live, in a high-rise, high-density apartment building; the average size of such an apartment in many Chinese is just 400-800 square feet, with three rooms.
Unfortunately for Asian consumers, many specifications used in building wireless technology products, such as wireless routers, are predicated on American ideas about the space and configuration of the typical home. But a router designed to transmit a WiFi signal throughout the average American home would broadcast to many neighboring units if installed in the typical apartment in China or Singapore. (Intel researchers learned that in Singapore, apartment dwellers with wireless Ethernet cards can turn on their computers and access seven or eight IP addresses of their neighbors. This problem is becoming increasingly familiar to some American city dwellers as well.)
These differences in technology infrastructure and in the size and shape of the typical home in Asia are just two of the challenges that Intel and others will face when exporting the concept of the digital home beyond U.S. borders. The People and Practices Research team is collaborating with business groups within Intel to explore how the digital home might evolve in countries from Asia to Brazil, Ghana and Russia to reflect the profound differences in the daily lives and cultural circumstances of people in different regions of the world.
The Role of Spirituality in Technology Adoption
Another theme that emerged in the course of the Inside Asia project is that technology is being used to support a range of people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Technology is also being consumed and utilized within these religious and spiritual frameworks.
Sometimes the relationship between technology and religion is complicated. For example, the idea of "constant connectivity," of 24-hour access to information seven days a week, is viewed as technological progress in the West and especially in the U.S. But all the major world religions prescribe times when followers should be explicitly disconnected from the everyday world. For these consumers, "always on" may not be an attractive option.
Ensuring that technology is compatible with spiritually is not so much a matter of changing technology as changing the visions that influence technology development. As the opening anecdote illustrates, technology and religion are not necessarily incompatible; in fact, technology can support people's spiritual beliefs and practices.
Companies that understand the importance that religion plays in people's lives, and respond with technology to support it, are already reaping benefits. For example, LG Electronics, the Korean company that introduced cell phones with embedded compasses to help Muslims locate the direction of Mecca, has seen strong sales for its line of "Mecca indicator phones." (The company has already developed an advanced version that sounds an alarm at prayer times.) And in recent years, General Electric and other major appliance manufacturers have recognized the power of religious belief and introduced ovens that include a Sabbath mode feature, designed to help observant Jews conform with Jewish law pertaining to the Sabbath. Among other things, in Sabbath mode, timers are silenced and no icons are displayed.
These examples are part of a growing trend of applying technology to serve people's most deeply held values. Intel researchers believe that a cluster of usage models will emerge to focus on spirituality, wellness and well-being, which are fundamental to people's everyday lives.
Translating Insight into Innovation
Intel has already begun to translate the findings of the field research conducted in Asia into new technology products. The company has introduced two innovations for Chinese consumers: the China Home Learning PC and the iCafé platform.
The China Home Learning PC supports educational experiences and development through a unique combination of hard-key switching between "educational" and "general" mode and a novel use of touch screens and voice-matching to coach children in Mandarin and English. This innovative product, which recently won a prestigious Asian design award, was jointly developed with the Founder Group, China's second largest manufacturer.
Intel's iCafé platform is a major new computing platform customized for the nearly 200,000 Internet cafes (or "iCafés") in China, where people socialize, send e-mail, watch movies, and play online games. Intel's new platform technology is expected to transform the way iCafés do business.
The average iCafe in China has 50 PCs, and the expense and inconvenience of periodic upgrades and daily operations can be substantial. Intel's platform technology for the iCafé increases the efficiency and reduces the cost of upgrading PCs. Using the new platform technology, upgrades that used to take days can be performed in less than a half hour. Intel estimates the new platform technology will save an iCafe $85 per PC.
While the iCafé platform was designed specifically for China, Intel plans to create versions for other parts of the world. In the near term, Intel is focusing on versions for Brazil, India, Egypt, Thailand, and Turkey.
These new technologies represent short-term responses to real human needs identified through ethnographic research in Asia. In the longer term, the goal of the People and Practices Research team is to help Intel envision entirely new technologies, or experiences that technology could support, that better reflect the context and culture in which they are used.
For example, the PC as we know it was built from the ground up with a Western set of values and constraints. It was designed to work in an environment where electricity is available continuously, by users who fall into a certain height and size range, who understand the concept of a desk, a desktop, and workflow, who know English and can use a standard "qwerty" keyboard. In short, there are numerous culturally laden assumptions built into the existing model of the PC. How might a PC look if it were built from the ground up in Malaysia or India or Kenya or Egypt? The goal of Intel's People and Practices Research team is to continue asking such questions, to help ensure that the products Intel develops will meet the diverse needs of people in a variety of cultures.
Looking Ahead
While the results of the Inside Asia study are being digested and shared with different groups around Intel , members of the People and Practices Research team are continuing to look ahead. Some of the team's research, taking place in China and India, is focusing on rural life and shared computing; other projects are exploring ideas about privacy, the city, urban life, identity and even libraries.
Genevieve, too, is looking ahead to another major project, which will attempt to identify logical cultural categories that inform technology usage. Cultural Computing is a multi-year, multi-researcher, multi-sited ethnographic project. With a focus in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the project builds on the team's insights into the importance of culture in technology usage. Three interlocking sub-projects will tackle questions of transnational migration; the relationship between technology and religion and gender; and the ways in which cultural practices might be shaping relationships to new information and communication technologies across the region. Ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Europe and Africa is expected to be carried out in 2005.
