Concomitant with its recent transformation into a platform company, Intel Corporation has recalibrated some of the metrics of success for its technology products. Rather than gauging success purely through increased processing power and speed, success for platforms is measured in (large) part by the quality and value of the experiences they enable for users. Does a platform afford people new opportunities to express themselves, manage their lives, better themselves and their families, feel the warmth of caring relationships, feel connected, respected, secure, empowered, content, enlightened, excited, transported, reflective, accomplished, and/or capable? Such questions cannot be answered by measuring transistors and resistors per chip or by what engineers know a platform is capable of supporting or what marketers or advertisers say it can do. Instead, the measure becomes how people experience technology. Building successful platforms involves taking seriously how people currently incorporate technology into their daily lives. Understanding people's feelings, point of view, and how they see the world becomes a necessary step in building successful platforms. Ethnographic research, with its goal of understanding the world through other people's eyes, allows Intel Corporation to incorporate our current and potential customers' perspectives on valued and valuable experiences into the platform planning process.

As an anthropologist in Intel Corporation's Domestic Designs & Technologies Research (DDTR) team, I study the complex relationships among people, spaces, and objects in domestic settings around the world, helping my colleagues in the Digital Home Group understand the experiences of technology that make sense in such spaces. An understanding of how people live, how they want to live, what matters to them, how technologies are used, understood, and imagined in homes around the world is the first step in the development of platforms that enable experiences people will, and do, value. In this paper, I explore the assumptions that inform my research, and through two case studies, I look at the types of research findings that are produced through ethnographic research and integrated into the design and planning processes to ensure that future platforms are user-centered.