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Article Reprint

DESIGNMANAGEMENTJOURNAL

Design EthnographyTony Salvador, Everyday Life Designer, Intel Architecture Labs,Intel CorporationGenevieve Bell, Anthropologist, Intel Architecture Labs, IntelCorporationKen Anderson, Design Anthropologist, MediaOne Labs

Copyright © Fall 1999 by the Design Management Institute. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission.To place an order or receive photocopy permission –(617) 338-6380 x223 Tel • (617) 338-6570 FAX • E-mail: dmistaff@dmi.org

Reprint #99104SAL35

DESIGNMANAGEMENT

JOURNALVOL. 10, NO. 4 FALL 1999

EDITOR 'S NOTES

Design in the Global Marketplace – Synthesizing Vision and Careful Attention toDetail

99104WAL06

Thomas Walton, Ph.D., Editor; Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, The Catholic University

KEYNOTE ARTICLE

Adaptation: The Key to Multicultural Marketing 99104RAD10Yuri Radzievsky, President/CEO, Globalworks.comAnna Radzievsky, Executive Vice President/COO, Globalworks.comElisabeth Mantello, Co-founder/Senior Vice President, Globalworks.com

THE EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE

“Designers, on Your Marks!” 99104ROU16Clément Rousseau, Chairman, Plan CréatifSamuel Grange, Co-founder/Manager, HumalogieDominique Wagner

CASE STUDY

The Peifan “Lucky Star”: A Car for China 99104CLA21Hazel Clark, Associate Professor, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityAnthony Ip, Researcher, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

STRATEGY

Managing the Challenge of Design for Innovation 99104VER29Robert Whitman Veryzer, Professor Emeritus, Perdue University, West Lafayette, IndianaStefan HabsburgRobert Veryzer, Associate Professor, Lally School of Management & Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Design Ethnography 99104SAL35Tony Salvador, Everyday Life Designer, Intel Architecture Labs, Intel CorporationGenevieve Bell, Anthropologist, Intel Architecture Labs, Intel CorporationKen Anderson, Design Anthropologist, MediaOne Labs

PRODUCTION

Muji: A Japanese Brand Meets the UK 99104SAT42Noriji Sato, Professor of Design Management, Environment & Design Institute, College of BusinessAdministration, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto

Global Dimensions of Web Site Design 99104MUL47Peter Seidler, Chief Creative Officer, Razorfish Inc.Thomas Müller, Creative Director, Razorfish Inc.

MARKETING

Brand Design Imperatives for Emerging Global Markets 99104KAT53Jerome C. Kathman, President, Libby Perszyk Kathman (LPK)

SUPPORT

Do You Dig Up Dinosaur Bones? Anthropology, Business, and Design 99104TSO69Judy Tso, Principal, Aha Solutions Unlimited

Designing for Other Cultures: A Strategic Approach 99104HAR60Dan Harel, Creative Director, Design Research, Corporate Design & Usability Center, Eastman KodakCompanyGirish Prabhu, Human Factors Technical Associate, Corporate Design & Usability Center, Eastman KodakCompany

DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999 35

S T R A T E G Y

Anthropologists are legendary for their studiesof exotic peoples around the world. Theimages linger in the public imagination: Mar-garet Mead playing with children in Manus;Colin Turnball sleeping in a crowded leaf hutwith the Mbuti pygmies; Clifford Geertzrunning from the law while attending a cock-fight in Bali; and Claude Levi-Strauss goingdeep into the Amazon rain forest to “capture”native practices before they disappear. Fornearly a century, anthropologists have beenour cultural translators, gathering storiesabout differences, learning a little about our-selves and others along the way, always tradingin the global as a series of interconnecting(sometimes disconnected) locals.

We have made sense of the “local”through ethnography, a portfolio of methodsthat have been developed to understand theperspectives of people by observing and par-ticipating in activities of everyday life. Wehave been the “merchants of astonishment”in print, in our classrooms, in popular

b y T o n y S a l v a d o r , G e n e v i e v e B e l l ,a n d K e n A n d e r s o n

culture—bringing tales of distant culturesand strange customs.1 Now some of us aremerchants in corporate settings—bringingtales of distant consumers and unfamiliarcustoms. We call ourselves design ethnogra-phers. We try to look deeper into what peopledo, what tools they use, and how they thinkto understand how to better make and sellproducts. The process of making sense ofother people is never easy, and making senseof how other people make sense is even moredifficult. But it is something that must bedone if we are to make and sell products ofvalue, whether we attempt to do this in ourown native cultures or countries, or whetherwe try to export them elsewhere.

But here is what causes us angst: Thepeople who could most benefit from our

Design Ethnography

Lview isn’t effective in the global marketplace.Design ethnography extends the cultural pan-orama. Illustrating this strategy and trying todecipher its implications for developing prod-ucts and services, Tony Salvador, GenevieveBell, and Ken Anderson ponder the relation-ships between the American family roomand the Italian kitchen table, between foodshopping and the importance of friendship.

culture, values, and experience.The trouble is this narrow point of

make judgments based on our ownACKING OTHER criteria, we

TONY SALVADOR

GENEVIEVE BELL

KEN ANDERSON

1. The phrase “merchants of astonishment” wascoined by Philip Kilbride, an anthropologist at BrynMawr College, in Pennsylvania. It refers to the ways inwhich anthropologists trade in images of the exotic.

36 DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999

DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

work in a corporate setting are also the mostlikely to question its relevance. Designethnography challenges the traditional twinoperating perspectives of business and pro-duction. As design ethnographers, we offer athird way, a complementary and compellingperspective that requires us to bridge twodistinctly different operational environ-ments: work and home. Ethnography,broadly defined, is a methodology used torepresent the perspective of everyday life.Design ethnography focuses on the broadpatterns of everyday life that are important

Fieldwork, as a rite of passage and as aresearch method, coupled with participantobservation (the notion that one learnsby doing and by watching) has alwaysbeen central to anthropology’s distinctiveepistemological standpoint. As design eth-nographers, we still rely on fieldwork andparticipant observation as basic groundingprinciples. But while Margaret Mead wasable to make 12 trips back to the field overseveral decades, we are often constrained bybusiness demands and time. Our field tripsare brief—an afternoon in the mall, a weekin museums, a fortnight in Italy. Thesecompressed time frames compel us to drawon a wider tool kit of ethnographic methods,including interviewing (structured andinformal), genealogies, social mapping,demography, photography, documentary filmmaking and videotaping, observation, archi-val research, and “deep hanging out” to shapeour sensibilities, knowledge, and understand-ing of the fragments of life we study.2 Wealso draw on a range of theoretical paradigmsand interventions, as well as pay particularattention to popular culture, to help shapethe questions we ask and the conclusionsand insights we draw. Post-modernism,feminism, Marxism, Ann Landers, Peoplemagazine, the popularity of professionalwrestling, the New York Times best-sellerlist—all these subtly influence our work.

A basic assumption of design ethnogra-phy is that people here, there, or anywhereare not just consumers. They are socialbeings, people with desires, wishes, needs,wants—some articulated, some unrecog-nized. They form complex social units andmaintain the basic fabric of daily life whileactively transforming themselves and theirenvironments, creating new meanings, expe-riences, and commodities as needed, wanted,and justified. Clearly, there is an interplaybetween what people desire and the newproducts, services, and technologies availableto them. And design ethnography gives usa language and a set of practices for talkingabout this ongoing invention andreinvention of products, meanings, and cul-tures. Discovering—even understanding—

2. “Deep hanging out” is a term coined by StanfordUniversity anthropologist Renato Rosaldo to capturethat sense of being profoundly immersed in a culture,although one remains actively engaged with more-explicit research agenda and methods.

Design ethnography

focuses on the broad

patterns of everyday life that

are important and relevant

specifically for the

conception, design, and

development of new

products and services

and relevant specificallyfor the conception,design, and develop-ment of new productsand services. At work,designers, marketers,and developers are of-ten entirely circum-scribed by their workculture. At its best,ethnographic researchin an industry contextreconnects these work-ers with the worlds theyinhabit and helps themimagine worlds theymay have never seen,from the mercato

(market) in Italy to the streets of west L.A.In this essay, we explore some of the ways

in which ethnography can inform design byrefocusing attention on the details of everydaylife that are meaningful for design. We firstdiscuss what design ethnography is, and whyit is valuable to the corporation. Then, draw-ing upon two case studies, we examine howthis approach can influence design and howthe corporation can manage this influence fordomestic, as well as foreign, markets.

Why Design Ethnography?Design ethnography is an emerging disci-pline that draws on many of the theories,practices, and methodologies of anthropol-ogy, as well as other social-science disciplines,such as psychology, sociology, and communi-cations. Design ethnography is based uponunderstanding what people do, what they say,and what they think. We do not ask consum-ers what they want; instead, we strive to un-derstand how they live. This represents asignificant shift from relying solely onsurveys, focus groups, or intercepts.

DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999 37

DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY

people’s ideas, beliefs, values, and behaviorsis not enough in the corporate setting. Weneed to transmogrify these ideas, beliefs,values, and behaviors into perceptions usefulfor design, marketing, and engineering.

There are two reasons why design ethnog-raphy has something to offer to industry spe-cifically and business practices more generally.The first is deceptively simple: designing tech-nology that consumers want and need. Untilrecently, many companies relied either on theirdeveloper organizations (“If we build it, theywill come”) or on their marketing organiza-tions (“56 percent of our respondents wish fora better detergent”). While one also cannotignore the fact that many companies havebeen successful using one or both of theseapproaches for the development of new prod-ucts, one also cannot ignore the vast numberof product failures, which everyone knowsabout, but which also go undocumented.

Design ethnography is a way of under-standing the particulars of daily life in such away as to increase the success probability of anew product or service or, more appropriately,to reduce the probability of failure specificallydue to a lack of understanding of the basicbehaviors and frameworks of consumers.

The second reason that design ethnogra-phy is so compelling is a little more compli-cated, but worth understanding. Designethnography interrupts the divide betweenwork and home. We bring the voices andlives of the end user or consumer out of thehome and into the business world. Cur-rently, there is a “context cavity” betweenliving and working. Perhaps it is more of acontextual asynchrony. Who we are in theworkplace is very different from who we areat home. Each environment values differentbehaviors and skills. A century ago, the vastmajority of Americans lived on and aroundthe family farm; so for most people, livingwas working and working was living. Therewas contextual synchrony; a better tractordesign meant better living. In America, onehundred years of urbanization and industri-alization has created and reified a dividebetween work and life.

The irony, of course, is that althoughthese American workers (engineers, design-ers, product managers, marketers) are thepeople who live in the homes we design for,something happens to them when they go towork. Individually, they adopt the corporateculture—those norms established and main-

tained by the corporation to facilitate anefficient and productive workplace.3 Collec-tively, they are individuals whose perspec-tives on both working and living conform tothe norms of a particular group, which tofacilitate the productivity and efficiency ofthe corporation for which it works, mustexpress less variability around those normsthan does the population as a whole. Indeed,the collective expression of self in a work-place is even smaller than what any oneindividual expresses in his or her ownhomes, and yet it’s understanding the ex-

3. We can only speculate that similar disconnects existin other cultures. There is a long tradition of participa-tory design in Scandinavia, for instance, in whichdesigners and engineers actively seek the participationof a wide range of consumers affected or implicatedin the product or process in question.

As design ethnographers,

we offer a third way,

a complementary and

compelling perspective

that requires us to bridge

two distinctly different

operational environments:work and home

pression of home lifethat’s important fordesigning productsfor the home.

Design ethnogra-phy, both in its prac-tices and its insights,provides designersand engineers witha language in whichthey can talk aboutexperiences andbehaviors that arecritical to life, con-versations that in thefirst person are notalways valued in awork context. De-sign ethnography can bridge the gap be-tween work and home. It also provides aschema in which it is possible to value andutilize ethnographic observations, withoutrequiring them to conform to strict scientificnotions of data. (Our participants do notmake facts, they do acts.) It is uniquely therole of the design ethnographer to expressthe relevant context of one culture to an-other, to narrate the acts. Design ethnogra-phy, because of its anthropological legacy,renders the global marketplace into a seriesof commensurate local environments.

In the sections that follow, we offer twoexamples of the kind of research design eth-nographers are doing. While both are relatedto issues of the global marketplace, theyillustrate different methods and design con-

38 DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999

DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

siderations. First, we provide a brief discus-sion of the pitfalls and challenges of doingdesign ethnography outside the UnitedStates. We then examine the ways in whichethnographic methods can be deployed toshape insights into e-commerce experiences.

The Table Is Life: Designing for ItalySitting at the dining room table late one after-noon, we are discussing with my hosts thedifferences between American and Italianhouseholds. Sophia, the matriarch of thisnorthern Italian home, wants to know aboutthe American “family room.” We tell her it isa room with comfortable chairs, a television,and sometimes a computer, where the familygathers to do things together. She looks at usbewildered and asks, “Don’t they have kitch-ens in America?” Sophia goes on to tell methat in Italy, in her house and in the homesof her extended family, the table is the centralplace. La tavola e la vita—the table is life. Inthis brief conversation, the local is revealed,and we scribble frantically in our notebooks.It is the defining moment of the fieldwork.

We spent two weeks in Italy, “hangingout” in a small town about 45 minutes north

basic ethnographic methods. We activelyimmersed ourselves in day-to-day life—participating in social activities, cleaning,child care, elder care, meal preparations, andshopping. We asked questions, we did whatwe were told, we took notes, we took photo-graphs, we watched, we were watched, wequestioned, we were questioned. We eventook genealogies and asked people abouttheir family histories. And while this methodwas time-consuming and offered no imme-diate insights into potential products or ser-vices, it helped us establish trust; we caredenough to ask about familial connections,and we listened to the answers. (It did pro-duce shoeboxes full of photographs that, inturn, suggested a possible space for digitalimaging technologies and image sharing.)

Establishing social intimacy is one of thehardest aspects of any fieldwork project. It ishard to be both an outsider/observer and aninsider/participant. Ordinarily, anthropologistsspend months, sometimes years, in the field,establishing trust and social intimacy and find-ing a comfortable way of negotiating the ob-server/participant roles. We don’t have theluxury of all that time, and as a result, we fre-quently forfeit a certain level of nuance andtexture.4 However, there are ways of effica-ciously establishing social intimacy. Theseinclude employing translators/consultants withstrong connections to the local community,selecting field sites that can be readily exploredin a limited amount of time, and doing a lot ofhomework (that is, combing through existingethnographic literature and market research, aswell as local histories, film, and other cultur-ally appropriate representations).

Consider this brief example of findingsand implications: It was clear to us that food,family, and social relationships differ fromthose in the US and, in fact, appear to ac-count for a large number of daily activities.We noted that there was no such thing as“take-out”; there wasn’t a paper cup or plateor a plastic spoon or fork to be found. In-deed, one of us was questioned for drinkingwater out of a porcelain cup. To Italians,water tastes best and is properly drunk only

4. By the same token, unlike most academic anthro-pologists, we have access to a wider range of resources(that is, consultants, market research, and existingresearch), and we are not constrained by the needto carve out a research project that will sustain andsupport tenure.

of Venice. We were there to explore thedomestic economy, to examine the ways inwhich Italians inhabit their homes, organizetheir days, engage in commerce, and use orrefuse different sorts of technologies, every-thing from packaging to computing. Wehoped to generate ethnographic insights thatwould suggest spaces into which new tech-nologies could be designed. So when Sophiatold us that the table was life, she was notjust stating a cultural fact, she was also ar-ticulating an important design consideration.

Doing fieldwork in Italy, even short-termfieldwork, required a return to some very

A typical, minimal midday table setting in an Italianhousehold. Utensils are not yet set.

Figure 1

DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999 39

DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY

out of glass; coffee on the other hand, isalways served in porcelain cups. We didn’tsee too many cars with cup-holders. Eventhe gelateria, the Italian version of an icecream shop, was aesthetically appealing and,by American standards, surprisingly formal.

Similarly, household food provisioningwas accomplished through an intricate set offamilial and social relationships in combina-tion with the scheduled availability of certainfoods. Many families rely not only on locallyavailable foods and wines, but also on foodsand wines provided by a spouse’s family in aneighboring town. Meat is acquired, whenavailable or as needed, from a brother whohappens to have a butcher shop, bread fromthe uncle who is a baker and who alsoknows, for instance, that Serena is too infirmto walk and therefore needs her bread to bedelivered. Fish, fresh and in upward of 40varieties, arrives on Mondays at the open-airmarket—the best, no, the only, place to getmost kinds of fish in the entire town—which means that fish is generally consumedearly in the week.

These two simple facts—no disposabletable settings, coupled with complicatedprovisioning patterns—suggest many designpossibilities. Clearly, eating establishmentsare less about sustenance and more about anactive life in public spaces. Creating newfoods should complement existing establish-ments and existing patterns of public life. Agreat example of a successful new-productintroduction in this area is the wide-spreadadoption of limoncello, a liqueur distilledfrom lemon peel and traditional to the prov-inces of Naples and Caserta and the island ofIschia, in the south of Italy. The liqueur,consumed after coffee, which itself is con-sumed at the end of the meal, has been mar-keted throughout Italy and is currently invogue as a replacement for more-traditionalliqueurs or sorbet from the respective localregions. It is best served ice-cold, in themanner of sorbet. Although it is unusual inall but the southern part of the country,limoncello is an authentic Italian beveragewhose marketing, through mass media andto local establishments, has created a newand popular product. The product fits inwell with established eating and public socialpatterns in that it arrives at the end of a longmeal, is served ice cold like the familiarsorbet, works well with readily availableglassware, and is positioned for the table as

opposed to “take-out.” In this context, onemight get the impression that a high qualityof product and experience, high authenticity,and a sufficiently-but-not-too-novel productare important characteristics for the Italianconsumer. One might be right.

5. Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of

Shopping (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

An ice-cream shop in a medium-size Italian town.

Figure 2

E-Commerce: Store or Story?It may be obvious that studying daily life inItaly—or the US—is an appropriate contextfor design ethnography. However, less obvi-ous domains of study are also approachableby using these methods. One of these is retaile-commerce, which is clearly gaining atten-tion for obvious business reasons. We havestudied e-commerce using ethnographictechniques as a design question—that is,“What characteristics of the Internet (broadlydefined) are relevant to the design of retailestablishments?” It’s not dissimilar tomarketer Paco Underhill’s anthropologicalapproach to understanding physical storeshopping behaviors. Underhill’s research asksthe basic question: “What changes can I maketo this store to increase sales?”5 It is a designquestion that requires understanding people’sexplicit and implicit shopping behaviors.

In our study of US-based retail com-merce, we employed a variety of methodsto derive an e-commerce design framework.These methods included photo surveys ofretail ecologies, interviews with personalshoppers, photo diaries of a week’s worthof purchases and subsequent interviews andfocus groups, a live documentary of a shop-ping excursion for a group of women inSeattle, historical review of shopping habitsand statistics, and a global survey of theethnographic literature of shopping. Inaddition, we interviewed several owners of

40 DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999

DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

businesses that operate either entirely orpartially on the Internet. No single datasource was by itself conclusive. Rather, theanalysis required thinking deeply about allthe data and how it all fit together from theperspective of identifying the potential valueof retail e-commerce to real people.

On the basis of our research, we gener-ated a framework (figure 3) that shows thefour basic shopping ecologies that emergewhen you pay attention to American con-sumers’ experiences of shopping. The fourcommerce ecologies are framed by two con-

commerce for the purpose of tending toothers—for example, taking care of theneeds of your family. Perhaps obviously, thisincludes grocery shopping, and perhaps lessobviously, it includes buying supplies for thatdeck (or other home improvement) you areworking on.6

The fourth narrative form is the pilgrim-age. In a way, the pilgrimage is the outing;it’s really about spending time with yourfriends and having a good time, with shop-ping as the context. It’s similar to the idea ofa group of people at your home watching afootball game—there’s as much attention toeach other as there is to the game. In thisway, shopping is something that can doneagain and again, in much the same way thatpeople might watch the same type of sport-ing event each week.

Each of these ecologies suggests differentdesign constraints. For example, mainte-nance shopping should require the absoluteminimum effort on the consumer’s part.Fast, easy, efficient, effective, few—if any—bells and whistles. In contrast, a business thatfalls within the pilgrimage form would needto create a context, a reason, for others togather, such that the commerce experience isalmost secondary to the social elements ofthe event. Being able to make a purchaseonly when there’s a touchdown during afootball game is much more pilgrimage-like,in that the primary reason for gathering is towatch football and not to buy the item. It is,thus, important to know what kind of shop-ping behavior (maintenance, consumption,provisional, pilgrimage) your product orservice implicates; or what kind of shoppingbehavior you wish to enable.

Consider this design example: House-hold food acquisition in the US appears wellplaced in the “provisioning” commerce ecol-ogy. At the great risk of oversimplification,and certainly relative to Italian households,food is more about sustenance than aboutexperience. Just consider “fast-food” restau-rants, microwave burritos, disposable tablesettings, prepared foods, drive-through cof-

6. This shopping form was first articulated by DanielMiller in A Theory of Shopping (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1998) on the basis of researchconducted in the UK in the early 1990s. Provisionalshopping also includes the likelihood of a small “gift”for the shopper—for example, a candy bar consumedin the car on the way home from grocery shopping.

tinua: the importance of the object beingacquired (does it have high social meaning orlow social meaning?), and the high or lowsocial relations that are implicated in thepurchase. In the maintenance ecology, thebasic story line is to get it done quickly andefficiently. Examples of this culled from ourdata include buying gasoline for your car,getting your auto insurance renewed, andpaying the lawn-care company for mowingyour lawn. A second narrative ecology isconsumption, in which the main point ofshopping is to feel good. This type of retailtherapy would describe the purchase of thatnew bike you’ve been wanting, or the blouseyou just can’t live without. We believe at thistime that the consumption model operatesmore intensely in America than in someother countries—for instance, Italy. Theprovision form is about conducting retail

These four retail “ecologies” are organized by whether theactual object has high personal meaning and by whetherthe social relationships surrounding the transaction arehigh in personal meaning.

Figure 3

DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL FALL 1999 41

DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY

fee shops, and cupholders in automobiles.It’s also interesting to watch the nascent on-line grocery industry, where opportunity isevident, given the right business model andimplementation of the right set of shoppingcharacteristics, to support a different form ofprovisioning. In Italy, on the other hand, itappears evident to us that on-line groceryshopping simply seems inappropriate, at leastfor the part of Italy that we were visiting.The relatively complex and meaningful in-ter-relationships of time, space, and socialcontext relative to food provisioning wouldnot appear to welcome a Peapod or other“disinterested” third party.

ConclusionsManaging this type of ethnographic workrequires an understanding that there are nocookie-cutter recipes for getting results.One cannot predict the “deliverable” beforeit happens; this is the work of discovery,regardless of product, service, or country.Moreover, ethnographic design methodschange depending on the question orproblem and the country or region. Not allstudies require the same set of methods andpractices; indeed, not all studies require thesame intensity. As design ethnographers,perhaps even more so than our academiccolleagues, we constantly experiment withnew methods and practices. In fact, you mustexperiment if you are to get at the issuesrelevant to your particular company or client.

Our industry context also compels usto experiment with ways of representingour work to others, including our product-oriented colleagues. The challenge inworking with designers, engineers, andproduct managers is finding ways to presentthe data that makes sense to them, a way thatconveys the richness and texture of day-to-day interactions and cultural fragments asthey are relevant to design. The challengeof presenting data is not new to anthropolo-gists. Historically, however, we producedmonographs and taught students. Now weare engaged in a new sort of production.Physical products or prototypes, perfor-mances of the findings (in theatrical or“museum-like” installations), and contentsketches might just as easily be outcomes ofour research, as are ethnographic insightsand cultural descriptions delivered via CD-ROM or film or text.

Once we see how something exists, howit is embedded in a context of relationshipsand associations, we begin to understand it.A table might be an eating surface, or itmight be the social center of the home. Arefrigerator may be a message center for afamily in Westminster, Colorado, but it isonly a cooling device on a Navajo reserva-tion—one that is lucky enough to have elec-tricity on a regular basis. A large TV may be astatus symbol in the Azores—or “wallpaper”in Culver City. Our sense of the globalcomes from making connections among all

The challenge in working

with designers, engineers,

and product managers is

finding ways to present the

data that makes sense to

them, a way that conveys the

richness and texture of day-

to-day interactions and

cultural fragments as they are

relevant to design

the different sites westudy. What we havelearned in Italy, inChina, on the Na-vajo reservation, inHispanic householdsin West L.A., in thesuburbs of Boston,all goes toward mak-ing the connectionsthat teach us aboutthe world. Designethnography offers apowerful way toexamine the circula-tions of meanings,objects, and identi-ties in diffuse time-space and bringthese to fruition, notin new descriptionsof localities, but innew objects and services that will make sensein those localities. We still study people. It istheir voice, their story, not our own, thatwe try to tell to marketers, designers, anddevelopers. ◆ (Reprint #99104SAL35)

Suggested ReadingsMiller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping, Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Parks, Tim. Italian Neighbors, or, A LapsedAnglo-Saxon in Verona. New York: GroveWeidenfeld, 1992.

Underhill, Paco. Why We Buy: The Science ofShopping. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.