People, Rather than Users

The ethnographic and qualitative research I do for DDTR is based on three fundamental principles. The first principle is that I study people, rather than users. While the purpose of the research is, ultimately, to inform the design of technologies that will be deemed valuable by the people who will use them, the ethnographic insights that will inform such design can not be gleaned from simply studying how people use and interact with current technologies in their homes. If we tightly frame our research gaze around physical objects (PCs, TVs) or services (MySpace, YouTube, or text messaging) we end up with a very skewed view of the world, one in which a complex person becomes, as Ken Anderson, a fellow anthropologist at Intel Corporation has argued, "an appendage to the technology instead of a person with a need that can be met by technology" [1]. As Anderson goes on to argue, talking about an end user narrows our gaze to a set of behaviors around technology: "using" a keyboard or remote control, navigating an interface, setting up a home network. Users "don't have feelings, beliefs, values, emotions or contexts—in short, they have no life. People live lives" [1]. In all of DDTR's research projects, our focus always starts off-screen, by which I mean that while we are ultimately interested in how people use (or don't use) technology, our research is never narrowly framed as studies of how people interact with screens or interfaces, be they on computers, televisions, mobile phones, PDAs, MP3 players, home automation systems, motorized vehicles, audio/visual systems, GPS, or portable gaming devices. Instead, our studies are framed around activities, social practices, values, homes, and relationships.

Domesticated, Rather than Epiphytic Technologies

The second principle that informs my work is that technologies are fundamentally altered when they move from the realm of the imagination, from the domain of experts such as engineers, designers, marketers, and retailers, into homes, the domain of users, people, and customers. They change from fetishized objects of boundless promise capable of transforming their consumers, to domesticated ones that are interpreted and used in particular ways that fit with, and sometimes challenge, pre-existing familial, gender, social, cultural, and political contexts and practices. They cease to be unknown, flexible commodities and become known, defined and limited, domesticated, and embroiled in what anthropologists and sociologists often call the moral economy of the household. When this happens, a television is no longer simply an entertainment device, just another screen on which we can view analog or digital content; it becomes a "member of the family" as one mother in India explained to me. When this happens, a GPS in a recreational vehicle ceases to be simply a navigation device and takes on the role of "marriage saver" for an American couple living full-time in a 200-square-foot home on wheels. When this happens, a few black garbage bags, some chairs rescued from the sidewalk, a cardboard box, a white sheet and projection TV bought on an online auction site transform a damp unfinished basement in the north of England into a much-desired (albeit damp) home cinema for a houseful of cash-strapped university students.

The promise of the so-called technology revolution of the 1990s heralded by the widespread adoption of the Internet and mobile phones in some parts of the world was whenever, wherever communication and connectivity to data.¹ In the 1990s, these technologies, particularly mobile telephones, were imagined as epiphytic, capable of being sustained through the ether; they were seen as not tied to particular locations or contexts, similar to epiphytes or air plants that access all their moisture and nutrients from the air and rain. No matter where one was or what the time of day, new information and communication technologies could connect us like never before. Subsequently, place and space would lose their importance as containers of experience. The ability to communicate would become placeless and global, rather than rooted in specific locations, cultural, social, and political contexts. Even more so than other commodities, new information and communication technologies were imagined as capable of transforming people's lives.

While this language was seductive, placeless new information and communication technologies and the practices they support turned out to still be very much rooted in place-specific values, practices, and the inconvenient necessity of physical infrastructures such as electricity and telecommunications wiring. Placing new technologies entails understanding how they are interpreted through local lenses. In Sweden, fixed-line and mobile telephony are closely tied to ideas of citizenship and narratives of modernity and nation-state. In the late 1990s, the stock price of LM Ericsson Telefon AB was popularly described as driving the fortunes of the entire country [4]. Placing new technologies also entails understanding how they are used to support existing cultural patterns and practices. In the United States (and likely other countries) MySpace pages become mourning sites, places to leave messages and gifts for teens who have met untimely deaths, places for the living to publicly announce and display their grief, echoing similar offline memorial practices at the sites of automobile accidents, where white crosses, cards, teddy bears, and the like create highly public landscapes of grief along American roadways. Moreover, placing new technologies involves paying attention to the inconvenient necessity of physically tying technologies to infrastructures and the cost of services. In Ghana, "flashing," i.e., placing a mobile phone call only to get a ring, and then hanging up and waiting to be called back is a way of combating the high costs of mobile phone calls. The recipient of the "flash" may, in fact, choose to call back from a pay telephone in order to get a cheaper rate than calling on her mobile phone—a far cry from a utopian vision of whenever, wherever connectivity.

Life Off Screen, Rather than Blinded by the Light

The third principle informing my work is that the most expedient way to study how technologies are domesticated and find a place in people's lives is to avoid asking tightly framed, scripted, and direct questions about how people interact with technologies in their homes. These kinds of questions may lead us to be blinded by the light, to be so dazzled by the primacy of the technology itself that we are overcome and fail to see how technologies come to find a place—physically, socially, symbolically—in homes. Therefore, DDTR's research frameworks are explicitly ethnographic, and they focus on people, social interactions, cultural values, and practices of domesticity while only casting sideways glances at technologies in homes. The outcome of such a focus is a rich understanding of the texture of daily life in homes around the world that is fertile ground for insight that feeds into the innovation process.

¹Such discourses of shrinking worlds and anytime/anywhere communication are, of course, much older than the last few decades; similar prognoses about the effects of the telegraph and telephones systems abounded in the nineteenth century. [2; 3]