The structures in which people reside, and their interpretations of them, are embedded with a great deal of cultural knowledge. As part of our charter to understand practices of domesticity around the globe—and the ways in which technologies are integrated within them—Intel's Domestic Designs and Technologies Research (DDTR) team uses a range of ethnographic methods to grasp how people shape, and are shaped by, their domestic environments. A method that has proven particularly effective for our group is a form of mapping inspired by developments in environmental psychology and related social sciences. At the source of this method is a process known as "cognitive mapping," generally defined as

a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment [1].

Kitchin condenses this as a "marriage between spatial and environmental cognition," where spatial cognition can be understood as the "cognitive representations of the structure, entities, and relations of space," and environmental cognition as "the awareness, impressions, information, images, and beliefs that people have about environments" [2].

Although there has been some debate about the various manifestations cognitive mapping might assume (biological/literal, analogous, metaphoric, or hypothetical [2]), we advocate the position that cognitive maps are essentially hypothesized—that they reside in the "mind's eye." However, since understanding cognitive maps is critical to gaining insight into domestic place as the locus of human intentions [3], there is a great deal to be gained from generating graphic representations of our participants' spatial and environmental processes and organizations of knowledge, however "sketchy, incomplete, distorted, and otherwise simplified and idiosyncratic" they may be [4].

Our methods for producing spatial schemata that represent specific components of our participants' cognitive maps typically begin with their perspective of the boundaries and proportions of the home. First, we ask participants to sketch a floor plan of their residence as they see it (without regard for cartographic accuracy or proportion). We then ask them to add domestic objects that are significant to their daily lives (i.e., furniture, technologies, appliances, etc.). From this basic rendering, participants are asked to respond to a series of prompts by using various colors to represent their interpretations, including their path of typical daily routine, best places to be together, best places to entertain, best places to relax, best places to learn, places of limited access, and areas of conflict. In addition to eliciting a dialog about their interpretation of the space, the exercise results in a set of representations that serve as visual artifacts from which we can develop comparative analyses (from home to home and across cultures). Figure 1 shows a typical map.

Figure 1: A map from a Brazilian household
click image for larger view
 

Collectively, the maps also form an archive that helps us understand how layers of cultural values, priorities, and world views are infused within domestic space, as well as how those layers intersect with technologies. From this, we begin to understand where technologies belong (and where they don't), how they may or may not fit into the fabric of everyday life, the sets of associations people have with various domestic experiences, and how "ecosystems" of domestic practice relate to "ecosystems" of technology.

REFERENCES

[1] Downs, R.M. and Stea, D., "Theory," Image and Environment, pp. 1–7, Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1973.

[2] Kitchin, Robert M., "Cognitive Maps: What Are They and Why Study Them?," Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 14, pp. 1–19, 1994.

[3] Hart, R.A. and Conn, M.K., "Developmental Perspectives on Decision Making and Action in Environments," Environment, Cognition and Action—An Integrated Approach, pp. 277–294, New York: Plenum Press, 1991.

[4] Kaplan, S., "Cognitive Maps in Perception and Thought," Image and Environment, pp. 63–78, Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1973.

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Jay Hasbrouck
Jay Hasbrouck is a Social Anthropologist in Domestic Designs and Technologies Research, within the User Experience Group of the Digital Home Group. Jay joined Intel in January of 2006 and has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Egypt, Germany, South Korea, Brazil, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Social Anthropology and an M.A. degree in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California. His e-mail is jay.hasbrouck at intel.com.