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Understanding how technologies are domesticatedhow they find a place (physically, socially,
symbolically) in homesis a key goal of ethnographers in Intel Corporation's Domestic Designs &
Technologies Research (DDTR) team. In this paper, I detail two ethnographic frameworks for
placing technologies. Following from the basic premise that asking direct, head-on questions
about how people use technology in their homes may lead us to be blinded by the light, to be
dazzled and overcome by the primacy of the technology itself so to speak, that we fail to see
how technologies are domesticated, I instead demonstrate, through two case studies, how DDTR
ethnographers cast sideways glances at technologies to come up with direct insights into the
types of experiences people have with and around technology. These insights inform the
development of future technologies that will make sense in homes and add value to people's
lives. Thinking laterally, we study small or extreme communities, practitioners, and domestic
spaces with the aim of gaining deeper insight into larger populations. Thinking holistically,
we study the entirety of the domestic lifecycle of a given consumer technology, avoiding
blindness by diffusing our focus from people's direct interaction with, for example, a TV
screen, to the entirety of the object's lifecycle in the home.
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