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Digital ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience
Design Management Journal, Spring 2003 by Masten, Davis L, Plowman, Tim M P
In the search for market insights, Tim Plowman and Davis Masten maintain that the pathways to information should include PCs, cell phones, Webcams, global positioning equipment, digital cameras, and a growing number of other technologies. Structured creatively for self-reporting, passive observation, and participant observation, these media can yield facts businesses can analyze to shape individual and strategic design decisions.
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The increasingly rapid migration of technology across geographic and socioeconomic boundaries is a fundamental constituent of the times in which we live. It is a process that takes subtle and numerous forms. Parents can check in on their kids at daycare over the Internet by using X10 technology. Russian teenagers organize roving raves through globally oriented blogs. American teens use Pringle's potato chip cans to enhance the range of their wi-fi-enabled PCs and warchalk the location (that is, mark on walls and sidewalks to indicate wireless access areas). Students everywhere are learning to surreptitiously text-message each other in class using their cell phones.
With the ever-lower prices of chips, disks, and memory, the continuing broadband revolution, and the development of new protocols, a new domain for the elaboration of self and culture has emerged, and it is worth studying. There has been considerable research on the social aspects of digital communication, online consumption, and the Web as a social phenomenon. Social scientists, marketing professionals, and product designers, however, have paid less attention to the opportunities presented by digital technology for understanding the lives of users and consumers.
We propose using the digital and wireless communication revolutions as platforms for rethinking ethnographic principles, methodologies, and analysis. Our goal is to produce new, deep, continuing, and rapid insights into people's lives and needs. We call this convergence and updating of traditional methods with digital technology Digital Ethno. The tools on the customer side are as ubiquitous as cell phones, PDAs, email, Webcams, SMS, GPS, and digital cameras. For anthropologists and, specifically, for ethnographers, all these tools can fall into the class of remote sensing devices.
Remote sensing
According to Paul Saffo, the director of the Institute of the Future, in Menlo Park, California, this is the decade of remote sensing. Computers and sensors are being embedded in many durable goods as a matter of course. Appliance manufacturers are embedding computers into refrigerators and ovens and, with the imminent adoption of new Internet protocols such as IPv6, many of these will be Web-enabled and connected. As more and more of these tools are produced and used, the price inevitably plummets. Only a few years ago, the basic chip set for a hand-held GPS (global positioning system) receiver cost $3,000 or more. Now, it's just a fraction of that price. With manufacturing costs this low, GPS systems are being built into many devices that we consider everyday tools, such as wrist watches and cell phones.
This cost/volume relationship holds true for a range of personal technology and sensing devices. Ubiquity and affordability make these technologies more realistic as research tools.
The Internet connection
Many of these devices have been designed for stand-alone and single-task purposes-meaning that when a motion-sensing plastic frog, designed in the US and built in Taiwan, calls out to you as you near the backyard pool, it is not connected to anything. However, many nations are moving into the deeply connected world of the global, networked economy. According to John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, the "wired" countries will be the ones with the fastest-growing and most-productive economies. What this means is that many of the products and devices that we think of as stand-alone will achieve new functionality and utility by being connected to a network.
We are only just starting to see examples of this networked world. These days, you can email the pictures you take to anyone with an email address. In Hong Kong, your cell phone will notify you when you are within range of a Starbucks and offer you a discount on a cup of coffee. In this case, your phone is tracked by the cellular ground station antennas, which triangulate on your location. In a striking and recent example, T-Mobile Sidekick users are sharing their daily experiences via their hip-top devices and the Web site, Hiptop Nation (www.hiptop.bedope.com). As the Web and broadband capabilities become increasingly like the water and power utilities of today, remote devices and similar technologies will be built and connected into more and more commodities. And, as the world becomes increasingly wired, it will become ever easier to conduct the type of research we are proposing. There are already at least 35 million Japanese using cell phones that are Web-enabled.1 Imagine if just one percent of them were participating in a sponsored contest to uncover the "next big thing" in street fashion, and as a result were engaged in collective trend-watching. Or imagine if another one percent emailed pictures from their camera phones to the local government and local media, visually and powerfully illustrating a safety complaint plaguing their neighborhood while they were currently describing it over the phone. The paring away of institutional and social distance and abstraction might have very positive effects in a variety of contexts.
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