Two such ways of casting sideways glances through ethnographic research are presented here. Thinking laterally, we study small or extreme communities, and practitioners and domestic spaces to come up with broader insights 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, to come up with focused insights into people's interactions with technology. These approaches are illustrated through descriptions of two exploratory research projects and how they were presented and received within Intel. Each story explores the risks and rewards of this research. The research methods of the first research project were occasionally deemed suspect and misread as narrowly focused. The research insights of the second project currently inform our thinking about new home entertainment platforms.

Thinking Laterally: Extended Mobility Project

One way to learn about digital homes is to study a particular small and extreme group such as "early adopters," a market segment that generally consists of people who are interested in new technologies and are among the first to buy. They care about brands and are interested in entertainment and gaming, and they are concerned with status and career success. Not surprisingly, early adopters skew towards the young, male, and well-educated, and the perspective of the early adopter is suspiciously close to the enthusiastic embrace of technology and understanding of hardware and software demonstrated by many of Intel's employees. As DDTR's goals are to help Intel see the world through "other people's eyes," to imagine other homes, other worlds, and other lives, in most of our research, we do not study early adopters.

Instead of early adopters, we sometimes study unexpected adopters, and find them in unexpected ways, when we set out to study people with particular social practices, rather than users or adopters of technology. During the summer of 2005, a design researcher, Michele Chang, and I completed a short and small-scale exploratory research project titled Extended Mobility. The project compared two types of travelers who are differently dependent on information networks and infrastructures with the aim of exploring how people who are traveling long distances (at least 200+ miles from their former home bases) over extended periods of time (6+ months) organized daily activities and needs without a geographically stable home base. We were interested in what people felt they "couldn't live without" (whether it be something as abstract as privacy or as concrete as a Wi-Fi hotspot), how they handled personal and property security, how they managed social, financial, and professional obligations, and how they organized their travel, their daily movements, and managed their health and wellness. While previous ethnographic work had been done by Intel researchers on short-term and/or short-distance mobility practices, such as daily commutes and business travel, and on mobile professionals such as truck drivers [5, 6, 7], Extended Mobility was designed to do just that—extend our understanding of mobility practices, through a short, rock-turning study to see if there was anything interesting we could learn from people who are perpetually on the go.

The research was conducted in the United States and our two types of travellers included budget travellers and people travelling by recreational vehicle. The budget travellers consisted almost exclusively of backpackers, primarily younger adults travelling on a tight budget generally outside their home country, staying in hostels or other low-budget accommodation and carrying their belongings with them on their body in a large backpack. The recreational vehicle travellers, or "RVers," consisted almost exclusively of older American adults (50+), many of whom were "full-time RVers," meaning that their only home was an RV. They had cut all connections to a "stick-house," their term for a conventional, non-mobile home.

Two things should immediately strike the reader about this project, both relating to the lack of a technology focus in the research framework. Following my first research assumption, we studied people and their mobility practices. The project could have been scoped as "how do RVers and backpackers use the Internet to plan their travels?" or "how do RVers and backpackers use mobile phones to keep in touch with friends and family?," which would have given us very restricted research findings that provide us little understanding of the context of technology use. Following my third research assumption, the questions posed have to do with the management of obligations and daily activities, rather than how these activities are managed using technology. While our study participants did, in fact, use various technologies—as low-tech as pens, paper, and cork bulletin boards in RV parks and hostels, and as high-tech as $7,000 RV roof-mounted satellite dishes and $500 smart phones—we did not limit our focus only to silicon-based technologies. This would have reduced our RVers and backpackers to appendages to technology use, rather than people facing particular challenges when managing their personal, professional, and financial obligations.

Our research methods included interviewing backpackers in hostels, and RVers in their homes in camp grounds, RV parks, at RV rallies, and at an RV conference. Participant observation was a key component of our methodology; we learned about the challenges of extended mobility by living (albeit for short periods of time) like our research participants. For the backpacker part of the study, we travelled and stayed in hostels, experiencing first-hand the anxiety of finding a room for the night, securing our belongings from theft, and the lack of privacy and quiet in a room shared with 11 other travellers. For the RVer part of the study, we rented a 29-foot motor home and lived in it for one week. We drove east from Portland, Oregon to Moscow, Idaho and back again. Along the way, we camped at different types of RV parks, where we met and interviewed RVers in their homes. In Moscow, we attended a conference for "wannabe" and "newbie" RVers called "Life on Wheels" that featured over 100 classes. The conference was attended by over 500 participants, the majority of whom were over the age of 55. We lived in our RV, attended classes, chatted with fellow conference attendees and instructors, toured homes during an evening open house, and did formal interviews in people's homes. We attended classes on everything from digital communications, weight restrictions, inverters, and chargers to healthy traveling, traveling with pets, and nurturing a happy marriage on the road. We also attended the Great North American RV rally in Redmond, Oregon where we conducted interviews, spoke with sales representatives about buying and maintaining an RV, and chatted with after-market retailers and fellow attendees. At both events, we collected and later read numerous sales brochures, magazines, pamphlets, and books about RVing, including books on how to cook in an RV, great routes, personal stories, how to plan a trip, and how to sell one's stick home and commit to full-time RVing.

Unexpected Digital Homes

Turning specifically to the RV half of the study, we found the mostly aged 55+ full-time RVers we met lived in highly digital homes. All of the RVs we visited housed assortments of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) including laptops, mobile telephones, GPS units, video cameras connected to dashboard displays that showed the area behind the motor home, Pocketmail^* (a product that allows one to send/receive email through a handheld device in conjunction with a telephone), and satellite dishes for digital television and broadband Internet connectivity. In the five RV parks we visited, a large percentage of RVs had a satellite dish for the TV, either built into the roof of the coach itself (costing about $1000) or as a free-standing unit placed outside the RV. Satellite TV, as we came to learn, is something that no RV is considered complete without. Each of our interviewed households had two TVs; a larger one in the front room of the motorhome, and a smaller one in the bedroom, closely approximating the average 2.24 televisions found in stationary American homes. Although not as popular as satellite TV, satellite Internet was present among almost half of the motorhomes we visited. These systems are very expensive, costing as much as $7,000 to install and incurring monthly fees of around $130. Seven of the eight households we interviewed were equipped with at least one laptop computer; three households had more than one computer.

In addition, RVs are replete with a variety of sensors and home automation technologies because resource management is an ever-present concern. Fresh water tanks have to be filled, and "grey" (shower and sink) and "black" (sewage) water tanks emptied; access to electricity, propane, and gasoline has to be procured at regular intervals. Tanks must be regularly checked, electrical hook-ups located, satellite systems aligned to avoid trees, tall buildings, steep hills, or other obstructions to the southern sky. These technologies make it possible for the RV to be used in a variety of settings, ranging from complete self-sufficiency (full fresh water and propane tanks; empty black and grey water) to complete dependence on infrastructures such as fixed location water, sewage, and electricity systems.

Expanding our Imagination—Sometimes Resisted

A key finding of our quick rock-turning project was that something remarkable and a bit unexpected was happening with people who are perpetually on the go. RVs turned out to be a noteworthy type of digital home that challenges and expands Intel's imagination about who and what we design for in a digital home. Much of the ubiquitous computing literature dealing with domestic spaces is based on a core set of assumptions about the physical size and infrastructure of the home, as well as the identity of household members, their life stages, values and lifestyles. In short, digital homes are assumed to be large (also glossed as American; a country where the average home is 1800-2400 sq. ft., the largest average in the world). They are imagined to be occupied by nuclear families containing children under the age of 18 and parents challenged by the frenetic pace of daily life and the need to get the kids to soccer practice on time. They are assumed to be blessed with robust and stable infrastructures and with owners who are willing to invest rather substantial amounts of money to automate, digitize, or otherwise boost their homes' IQs. Thinking about RVs as digital homes challenges us to design for a completely different physical footprint and infrastructure, and to design for household members in different life stages with diverse values, needs, and willingness to invest in their homes. What happens when you start designing technologies for the following: a small, unstable digital home; one where access to the Internet can change nightly, depending on shifting obstructions to the southern sky; one in which it may make sense to install a $7,000 satellite because it is, ultimately, portable (it can be removed when the home is sold), but installing complex calendaring and reminding systems to manage children's extracurricular activities and parents busy work schedules makes no sense?

When presenting the research findings from this study to internal audiences, we always carefully explain the value of learning about an extreme or small community as a case study that can give us insights into larger populations. The point of the project was to get us out of our preconceptions of what a digital home can look like; to give us insights that will help us when thinking about making homes in other parts of the world digital, i.e., small homes, homes with intermittent access to infrastructure, homes that need concerted effort and intent to keep taken-for-granted infrastructures and utilities like Internet access functioning, second or vacation homes, and/or homes occupied by relatively tech-savvy older adults.

After spending ten minutes explaining the project, complete with a poster outlining the research implications to attendees at a publicity event, I was asked by an Intel engineer, "Have you sized this market?" Given my framing of the project, the market that this research speaks to is potentially huge. Yet, what the engineer was asking me was "Have you sized the RV market?." While I knew there are approximately 30 million Americans who currently use the approximately 8.2 million RVs on US roads, and nearly 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 55 owns an RV, I was not arguing that Intel should design platforms for RVers [8]. The challenges they face in their domestic spaces are a fruitful starting point for thinking about much larger markets. For engineers who are accustomed to thinking about products, our work is sometimes misread as a study of products or market sizing for particular products. Instead we are thinking of expanding markets by recalibrating our expectations of the people for whom we are designing technologies. We are expanding our imaginations, not sizing markets.

Turning from some of the potential limitations of not focusing our research directly on technology use to some of its successes, my second example details a recently completed multi-country research project.

Thinking Holistically: The Social Lives of Televisions

In addition to making sure that our research frameworks are firmly focused on people, their values and practices, another way we avoid being blinded by technology is to extend our gaze at a technology beyond its screen to its entire lifecycle in a household. In the past year, I have led a four-country study of a truly ubiquitous technology in homes around the world, the television.² Television sets can be found in 1.1 billion households worldwide. In developed economies they are found consistently in between 96 and 100% of households, and in urban centers in some developing economies they are found in upwards of 85% of households [9]. In some areas of the world, they have been common in homes for over forty years. When thinking about digital entertainment in the home and what the future might hold, the television, as the well-loved and ubiquitous incumbent technology cannot, and should not, be overlooked.

In this project, entitled "The Social Lives of Television," we examined television as a social and cultural object and as a practice in urban middle class homes in China, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We were interested both in the physical object of the television and its attendant and dependent devices, and the experiences the content on a television enables. By broadening our focus from the television screen and the content available on it to the entire domestic lifecycle of the device and the experiences it provides household members, its relationships to people, other objects and practices in the home, we wondered what lessons we could learn to help us think about the future(s) of entertainment in homes. Moreover, we wanted to know what we could learn about building other potentially ubiquitous technologies for homes.

The research framework builds from the second and third guiding principles that inform my work, as outlined earlier in this paper; namely, that technologies are fundamentally altered when they move from the realm of the imagination—the market and advertising—into homes, and that the most expedient way of studying this alteration is to avoid tightly framed questions about how people interact with digital screens in their homes.

Our research methods for this project were similar to those for Extended Mobility, in the sense that we learned both by asking questions of our research participants, and by ourselves doing the same things they did. For the field site where we did not speak the local language, we partnered with a Ph.D.-trained qualitative researcher who was based close to our field site. She provided translation during interviews, and also provided guidance during other fieldwork activities. To understand how televisions are domesticated in middle-class homes, we twice visited for between two and four hours each 6-10 households in Hangzhou, Chennai, Leeds, and Kansas City. During these visits, we conducted semi-structured, opened-ended ethnographic interviews and home tours with research participants. Additionally, we had participants complete a photo diary between visits. Besides the home visits, we explored practices surrounding television outside the home in each of these four field sites. We visited retail locations selling television, attendant devices, and mediated content. These ranged from mega-stores to flea markets and street vendors to grey and black market outlets. We explored television consumption in public settings like mahjong parlors, pubs, coffee shops, restaurants, and public squares. Additionally, we investigated what it was like to buy a wide range of objects and services in these cities: we talked with realtors, went shopping for food, large and small household goods, visited significant sites (cultural, political, leisure) and absorbed as much as we could about the rhythms of daily lives in these cities.

Our research was informed by anthropological theories of consumption and domesticity [10, 11], as well as by methodologies for studying new information and communication technologies in domestic settings [12]. From consumption studies, we took the perspective that objects express social status and identity of their owners and caretakers, and through their use and exchange give physical form to cultural categories and social structure. We drew on Kopytoff's concept of the cultural biography of things [11], to think about how the identity and meaning of objects, such as television, change over time, as they are exchanged, bought, sold, gifted, used, come into contact with other actors and objects, and age.

To structure our investigation of the domestication and life cycle of televisions in urban, middle-class homes, we used Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley's tripartite model (appropriation, integration, conversion) for studying domestication of ICTs. Our research included such questions as these:

• Appropriation. How do televisions come into homes? What prompts acquiring televisions? How is content procured for the television (free to air analog or digital signals, cable, satellite, packaged media such as VHS, VCDs, DVDs, games, etc.)? Who is involved? Who is not involved? Why?
• Integration. How and where do televisions fit physically in homes? How do they fit socially? How do they move within the home? Where are they placed? Who controls how the television is used? What other activities happen when the television is in use, or not in use?
• Conversion. How does the television become a meaningful object? Is the object or the content it facilitates tied to individual, family, or household identity or social status? Are televisions or practices surrounding them tied to lifecycle transitions of individuals, families or households?

More Than Screens: The Most Powerful Object in Homes

Through our research, we learned that TVs are much more than screens for viewing content. They are companions, trusted advisors, time-killers, necessities, educators, informers, social-life enablers, child-minders, boredom-busters, stress-fighters, lullabies, and low-maintenance friends. Their use is often highly ritualized and affects the daily routine, use of time, and use of space in the home. They are considered so important that they are often afforded prime real-estate in the home, the objects around which all other furnishing and decorating decisions are made. Like family members, they provide emotional support and comfort, and their conspicuous placement and constant use lend structure to domestic time and space that facilitates and enables the seamless flow of daily responsibilities and activities.

For the households we visited, televisions were more numerous than any other ICT in the homes and were found in more locations in homes than any other, including living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms, kitchens, hallways, parents' bedrooms, grandparents' bedrooms, children's bedrooms, unfinished areas, garages, attics, children's play rooms, closets, and storage rooms. Most importantly, they were found in rooms where household members spent significant amounts of time during any given day. While the layout and size of homes differed dramatically (from >2400 sq. ft. for some homes in the US and UK to <600 sq. ft. for some homes in China), televisions were consistently in heavily occupied and high-traffic areas, unlike other ICTS like PCs or laptops, which were often ghettoized, when possible, to their own special-purpose rooms, or at the very least they were given marginal real estate, such as being tucked into the corners of rooms, their screens perpendicular to a wall.

For those households whose homes were large enough to allow for space or rooms that were not in constant use (mostly found in Leeds and Kansas City, where homes we visited were all at least 1200 sq. ft., and usually not as densely populated as the homes in Chennai and Hangzhou), the physical presence of a television or the availability of particular content on different televisions was often used to define the use of space in the home. For a single man in his early 40s in Kansas City, the absence of a television in his living room made the room unusable. As he explained, "I mean, I can't use my living room right now other than for chatting so it's—it would be a good place to have a TV in this house." Not only can't he use the room for anything other than chatting, he does not use it at all. For him, the room was uncomfortable, and it could not support social interactions with his friends, which he felt could not be properly done without the presence of the television. He felt stymied in his attempts to entertain in his home because, as he said, he needs "a reason to go in there like, "'oh, let's go watch TV'." For a family in Leeds with two lounges, conscious choices were made about what devices to attach to TVs in each room. For the "parents' lounge," the parents chose to have only a freeview box (digital aerial set top box) attached to the television, rather than a cable box, as they had in the "children's lounge." In effect, this means the children cannot watch their favorite cable cartoon channel in the parents' lounge, and by default, this room, with its white leather settee and custom-made furniture, becomes a place for peace, quiet, relaxation and escape from daily chores and responsibilities for their mother.

Televisions are placed in central locations in the home and valuable real estate afforded them because people see them as having broad value in their daily lives. While television certainly entertains, there are only so many hours in one day that can be devoted to entertainment. In many households we visited, at least one television was always turned on when people are present—or sometimes not present, up to 24 hours a day. What other experiences does the television support that makes it compelling enough to place everywhere and have on for long periods of time each day?

Very few people we interviewed used the word "entertainment" to describe what their TVs do. Instead, they talked about what the experience of using the television enabled, which was often only tangentially related to the television's role as an entertainment device. TVs "do" things besides entertain, and many of these things were described as activities that a caring family member or close friend would be entrusted with such as keeping one company and staving off loneliness, easing one's worries, acting as a trusted advisor, educating children, hosting social gatherings, lulling one to sleep, providing rewards for good behavior, to give but a few examples. And best of all, the television was seen as a low-maintenance technology; dependable, not in itself needy of attention or unstable, in essence, a giving but un-needy friend.

Because the television is viewed as capable of filling such roles, its presence and use play a key role in the flow of daily routines, and in many cases it comes to shape not only the use of space in the home, but the use of time. In several households with "always-on" televisions, the content on the television informed people when it was time to do certain tasks such as when to eat meals, put children to bed, take naps, do household chores like folding laundry, cooking, cleaning, and attending to educational tasks such as homework or to spiritual contemplation.

Thinking about Future Platforms

As the previous discussion indicates, televisions are more than just sources of entertainment; they are meaningful objects and sets of practices that are embedded in complicated domestic spaces and are part of relationships among household members. Our research findings have prompted us to reconceptualize how we define entertainment, and to look at the challenges inherent in providing compelling entertainment experiences in the home. By expanding our focus from people's interactions with the content on the screen—electronic program guides, ways of handling and using remote controls—to the contexts in which televisions as physical objects are found and the practices they support (watching, listening, multitasking, relaxing, learning, spending time with others, advising, de-stressing, babysitting, etc.), we can start to think of experiences of technology that make sense in domestic settings. Entertainment shifts from a small category of experience involving immersive escape from other activities, to a broad category, opening up many opportunities for us to think about platforms that can deliver value to our customers. The findings from The Social Lives of Television are currently helping to inform our thinking about entertainment platforms for the home.

² Other researchers involved in this project included Ashwini Asokan, Susan Faulkner, and Barbara Barry.