Sideways Glances: Thinking Laterally and Holistically About Technology Placement in the Innovation Process

Understanding how technologies are domesticated—how they find a place (physically, socially, symbolically) in homes—is a key goal of ethnographers in Intel Corporation's Domestic Designs & Technologies Research (DDTR) team. In this paper, I detail two ethnographic frameworks for placing technologies. Following from the basic premise that asking direct, headon questions about how people use technology in their homes may lead us to be blinded by the light, to be dazzled and overcome by the primacy of the technology itself so to speak, that we fail to see how technologies are domesticated, I instead demonstrate, through two case studies, how DDTR ethnographers cast sideways glances at technologies to come up with direct insights into the types of experiences people have with and around technology. These insights inform the development of future technologies that will make sense in homes and add value to people's lives. Thinking laterally, we study small or extreme communities, practitioners, and domestic spaces with the aim of gaining deeper insight 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.