Grounding blue-sky research: how can ethnography help?

In many cases, such as those just cited, the intention is to provide early input into system design or redesign as opposed to late evaluation of a near-complete prototype, or to illuminate problems or advantages of existing systems and practices. In most of these cases, the design focus is, at a general level, well understood. The ethnographic analysts set out with a fairly clear idea of what the problem domain is and what activities should be considered central to their inquiry. In contrast, the issue we tackle in this paper concerns the value of ethnography in developing innovative technologies and services where we have few assumptions about our intended products to begin with. How can an understanding of current practices of work, home, education, and play help us to invent, design, and develop the next generation of completely new products? Perhaps we should begin by considering the types of organizations where we expect the next generation of products to be conceived. Over the last couple of decades, a number of large technology companies and universities have established laboratories for " blue-sky " technology research. This involves building and evaluating ambitious prototypes of computer based systems that are non-incremental innovations of existing technology and unlikely to be " productized " within 5 years. Xerox PARC, Apple Research Labs, the MIT Media Lab, and Interval are fairly well known examples of such places. Researchers, from a diversity of backgrounds in the so-called " hard " and " soft " sciences, and increasingly in the arts, invent, develop, study, and even live inside innovative technologies for the future. For example, the charter for the Media Lab is " to invent and creatively exploit new media for human well being and individual satisfaction, without regard to present day constraints " [15]. A driving aspiration is to develop the next " killer app " and, more generally, to play a major part in shaping paradigm shifts in computing and communications technologies. Certainly there is no shortage of good ideas for new products based on research or, indeed, new techniques for designing or prototyping them. For example, a group manager at Apple Research Labs once told us that as he walked from his office to the cafeteria he could easily come up with 20 new ideas for products. Similarly , it is normal in the blue-sky research culture to experiment with innovative design methods, such as …