The two case studies presented here illustrate that the value of ethnographic research lies in the fact that it provides a soft or diffused focus on technology use, combined with a sharp focus on people, looking at their homes, their daily lives, their relationships, and their values. Because such research always privileges people over technology, our research frameworks may initially seem to indicate that our attention is not focused on our "real" topic; gaining insight that will ensure that the technology platforms we develop will be used by and be useful to our customers. Because ethnography is not a prescriptive science, but an interpretive one, the deliverables produced are insights into people's daily lives and values that inspire innovation rather than dictate platform ingredients. Just as research findings are never "found" but are the result of data-gathering methods that are theoretically informed, and are in turn analyzed using social theory, so too are they in turn never taken, undigested, into the platform planning process.

DDTR researchers work closely with usage modelers, interaction designers, consumer experience architects, and human factors engineers from Experience Definition and Assessment (EDA), the sister group that forms the other half of the Digital Home Group's User Experience Group. As a whole, the User Experience Group defines consumer experience and value propositions for the platforms developed by the Digital Home Group. Subsequently, the User Experience Group has processes in place to move from ethnographic research findings to technology usage details that inform platform, subsystem, and ingredient planning and requirements related to user experience. It is at this tertiary level of translation of research data that our language shifts from people to users. Working with DDTR researchers, EDA members identify desired experiences which they combine with knowledge about technology to establish the usage scenarios needed to create those experiences. EDA members craft usage models that contain the detail necessary to translate usage information into a set of user requirements and to guide planners, architects, and engineers in generating platform and ingredient requirements, both hardware and software, that will meet the user requirements. Usage models include summaries of the usage, use cases (related interaction between uses and the system), scenarios that illustrate how users in a specific context actually use the system to accomplish their goals, task flows, and operational profiles. The tasks are translated to user experience requirements, allowing us to map directly to platform capabilities, the features and services that enable particular experience requirements to be met.

An analogy can be made between the relationship that Intel's products have to consumer goods and the relationship DDTR's ethnographic research has to the production of new platforms. In neither case is there a direct mapping: Intel Corporation does not make consumer products, but it makes the bits inside that make consumer products like PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, set top boxes, work. Similarly, the knowledge about diverse practices of domesticity that DDTR researchers produce does not directly inform new platforms but is combined with market research, technology, and business intelligence to inform and inspire innovation by enabling planners, engineers, and designers with knowledge about people rather than users (as complex actors with multifaceted agendas, loyalties, priorities, and values beyond their direct use of technology) so that they can create technologies that will support meaningful and valued experiences in and of the home.