Within Intel Corporation's Digital Home Group, DDTR members are charged with broadening and deepening the company's understanding of people, homes, social and cultural practices, and the role technologies play in these spaces, so that we can develop new technologies that will be easily and eagerly placed in people's lives. We broaden our understanding by moving beyond the homes and practices in the United States with which the majority of our colleagues are most familiar. We deepen our study by developing a clear and actionable understanding of how people live, how they want to live, what matters to them, how technologies come into their homes and how they fit physically, culturally, and socially with existing spaces and practices. We also look at how technologies are implicated in social interactions, how they are an expression of status, and how they affect the identity of their owners, caretakers, and users. These insights are combined with other data including market, business, and technology intelligence to define consumer experience and usage requirements for the platforms developed by the Digital Home Group.

With backgrounds in design research and design interaction, anthropology and documentary film, DDTR researchers have conducted ethnographic research in fourteen countries in the past 12 months. To paraphrase Malinowski, the American anthropologist famous in part as the father of fieldwork, our goal is to help our colleagues "see the world through other people's eyes" through our research, analysis, and presentations. What is it like to be a thirty-year-old accountant living in a 500-square-foot apartment in a 20-year-old building in Hangzhou, PRC with your daughter, husband, and your parents? What is it like to be the 80-year-old patriarch of a multi-generational family living in a 1200-square-foot house in Chennai, India? What is it like to be a 58-year-old retired fitter in Brittany, France, splitting your time between a condo in the city and a vacation home on the coast? If we understand how our customers see the world, what they want to accomplish, and how technology can play a role in their lives, we can build platforms that they will value.

As the popularity of claiming that one does ethnographic research has increased in recent years among the wide range of industry professionals interested in learning about consumers, users, and other business-defined populations, ethnographic research has regrettably become a catch-all for all qualitative research methods—from focus group discussions and standardized surveys administered in participants' homes to participant observation and in-situ open-ended interviews. While only the latter two methods qualify as ethnographic, the problem with such loose use of the term "ethnographic research" is larger than this. For DDTR researchers, ethnography is more than an assemblage of field research methods; it is a practice involving theory, methodology, and analysis. Literally "writing culture," ethnography is essentially interpretive, and thus analysis and presentation are key components. Ethnographic "research findings" are an unfortunate misnomer that imply a transparency of knowledge: in other words, "findings" are "found," ripe for the picking, accessible to anyone with a notebook, set of questions, or video camera. This is not the case. Making sense of what we experience and what people tell us while in the field hinges on a solid grounding in social and cultural theory. Our research frameworks are always theoretically informed. From a project's inception through to the presentation of findings, we make clear our assumptions about the nature of culture, social relations, the individual, networks, identity, and technology.

Before turning to two ways we frame our research projects, I want to examine in more detail three guiding principles that inform how I approach my work.