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INTRODUCTION¹

American anthropology has always been preoccupied with the notion of culture–how to describe it, document it, theorize it, and make sense of it. For the most part, anthropologists focus their critical gaze outside western culture, taking as their object of study all manner of unexpected peoples, places, and rituals. While such work often informed policy decisions and various forms of governmental and non-governmental interventions, anthropologists sought an academic audience for their insights.

Running in parallel to these academic inquiries, and sometimes intersecting them, has also been a tradition of applied ethnographic work, with anthropologists giving guidance to the public and private sectors in the US and abroad. With a few notable exceptions, most practitioners remained within academic institutes. Recently, however, there has been a trend toward hiring anthropologists (and others who practice ethnography) in the public and private sectors.

In most of their early incarnations, ethnographers working in industry focused on studying work places and work practices, providing insights into the ways in which knowledge was constituted and transmitted, and into the functioning of many different kinds of organizations (1). Over the last decade, there has been a small but growing presence of industry-located anthropologists and ethnographers turning their attention to consumer culture and non-work place practices. They join the ranks of human factors engineers, usability professionals, market researchers, and all manner of other non-traditional qualitative research workers interested in understanding peoples' behaviors and cultural practices.

For the last five years, ethnographic research techniques have been influencing technology development and innovation at Intel. The largest concentration of ethnographers can be found within People and Practices Research. This research group is comprised of a number of social scientists (trained in anthropology, psychology, communications), and designers and developers. Members of the group have conducted fieldwork in the US, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America, spending time in people's homes and businesses, as well as in a range of other social and work spaces.

As a member of this team since 1998, I have participated in research projects in a number of locations outside of the US. In this paper, I focus on fieldwork conducted in Western Europe in the summer and fall of 1999. This work was Intel's first attempt to conduct ethnographic research outside of the US, and we developed and refined appropriate field methods for this research.

This fieldwork was prompted by an internal request from an Intel product group to determine the characteristics of home life in Western Europe relevant to the design of consumer computing products and services. Initially, the project focused on Germany, France, and the UK and was later expanded to include Spain. It was hoped that our research would focus the discussion on Europe as a critical non-US geography, and that it would supplement available market research with a sense of the household rhythms and cultural patterns of Europe. There was also a sense that getting smart about European life in this way might help frame or contextualize future product development.

As a result of this research, we identified four critical domains of cultural significance in Western Europe: (1) togetherness, (2) media experiences, (3) consumption patterns, and (4) life outside the home. In this article, I explore these domains and provide examples from our fieldwork. These domains allow us to make comparative assessments across cultural traditions and also explorations within them.

Appropriate Methodologies

This project represented a large undertaking for our group. Since it was established in 1995, People and Practices Research has been charged with the task of understanding people and their daily practices with an eye to finding new users and new uses for technology. We spend time in domestic and urban spaces, hanging out with people as they go about their daily lives. We attempt to translate insights about peoples' behavior into product concepts, technology innovations, and strategic long-range planning. Our research portfolio includes field studies with teenagers, recent retirees, empty nesters, and families with small children, as well as cross-demographic examinations of such issues as health, shopping, mobility, travel, leisure, and broadband. We have also turned our attention to different kinds of spaces: the home, small businesses, schools, the mall, etc. In all of our work, we attempt to understand peoples' experiences holistically, rather than just in interactions with technology.

Making use of ethnographic methods in non-academic settings involves both a reliance on participant observation, as well as the development of new ways of getting at "cultural contexts" (3, 4). It is important to remember, however, that the ethnographic methods are a way of getting at what people are thinking, and it is that attention to people's real desires and thoughts that makes ethnography a useful approach for the design and development of technology.

At its best, ethnographic research helps convey an experience, a sense, a feeling, a glimpse, or a window into another world. It is a way to look into people's lives that follows their own stories and interests. It is also a way of talking about deep cultural patterns that implicate everything that people do. Knowing these stories, interests, and patterns makes it possible to design and develop products and services that fit (intuitively) into people's lives.

Design ethnography is an emerging discipline that draws on many of the theories, practices, and methodologies of anthropology (as well as other social science disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and communications). Its practitioners are located within a variety of industry contexts including manufacturing, marketing, and high technology. Design ethnography shifts the focus from attempting to create holistic representations of entire cultures to generating accounts of specific social practices or social groupings. Design ethnography disrupts the assumption that people are just consumers: "they are social beings, people with desires, wishes, needs, wants–some articulated, some unrecognized." (5) As such, it relies on a rich and nuanced understanding of what people do, what they say, and what they think.

Traditional ethnographic research takes the long view: getting to know a place, a people, a culture over months, years, or sometimes, even a lifetime. It is about acquiring a sense of subtleties and nuances, about the smallest details and about the ways all such details piece back together into a coherent or contested whole. Clearly, in an industry context, you don't have the luxury of the traditional long view, and periods of research are considerably shorter and far more focused; however, we still have a persistent interest in understanding the subtleties and complexities of social practices. This creates methodological and theoretical challenges.

Anthropologist George Marcus has suggested, that in framing research across multiple sites, you should establish or identify an appropriate vector to cross-cut the sites (2). The vectors he identifies as appropriate are deceptively simple: people, a "thing," a metaphor, a plot, story, or allegory, a particular life or biography or a conflict. In this project, we chose to pay attention to a "thing"–the home.

This project required that we pay attention to the home not only in a broad European context, but also with reference to the specificities of five very distinct national traditions and sets of cultural practices. So we developed a method of identifying and tracking important cultural values. This indexing system relied on spending time in at least three different kinds of sites within each country. We started by spending at least a week (sometimes two) in a small town, so that we could get a sense of the daily and weekly flow of life, (i.e., weekdays, weekends, school days, holidays, church days, market day, etc.) in a setting that we could easily manage. We moved from that small town to a larger population center, and then a large metropolitan center (Paris, Berlin, London, and Barcelona). We believed that if a behavior existed in smaller, and frequently more culturally conservative towns, and it persisted all the way into big cities, then it was an important behavior or activity. This indexing helped us discover important cultural patterns and spaces.

Although our European research employed a range of standard ethnographic methods: observation, participation, and interviews, as well as an attention to appropriate cultural contexts, we were aware of the need to develop research methods that redressed some of the issues that arose with such short field stints. First and foremost, we relied on the fact that the consultants who worked on this project were already embedded within particular communities, and we leveraged those connections to jump-start the process of gaining access and acceptance. This sort of "friends and family recruit" meant that we did not have a random sample of households in the countries we visited, but it did mean that we had a remarkable degree of social access. It also had the advantage of allowing us to be at multiple points within an extended social network, watching it in operation.

We tried to do everything that local people do to get a sense of what it is like to be there as a native, not as a tourist. We spent time in people's households; photo inventoried them, and tried to get a sense of daily life by asking people explicit questions and by following them through their days and their activities. We spent time in public spaces and public places watching and observing what people do there. We talked to everyone who would talk to us and asked lots of questions about what life is like and what people do there. We asked questions about shopping, catalogs, e-Commerce, travel, newspapers, TV, computers, phones, children, health, space, design–about life in general.

¹ This paper follows several important ethnographic conventions, which differ significantly from traditional scientific approaches. Firstly, this paper is based on qualitative research with small non-random samples of European households. Secondly, this paper is written in the first person. For almost a century, anthropological texts have been authored in the first person, reflecting in part the discipline's tradition of reflexivity, but also acknowledging the fact that the work is not "objective." Thirdly, because most ethnographic accounts include descriptions of living cultures and real peoples, anthropologists tend not to use people's real names, or give other identifying information. In this paper, I have changed people's names to ensure their privacy. And although many of these interviews were not conducted in English, I have quoted from people in translation.