Augmented ethnography

Abstract

We describe a sensor toolkit designed to help ethnographers better understand people's everyday activities. Techniques, such as diary studies, where participants capture their activities for a period of time are routinely used in technology design and evaluation at companies like Yahoo!. Less frequently used is shadowing where ethnographers accompany or follow people as they go about their tasks. However, with the increasing penetration of mobile personal devices like cell phones and GPS-enabled, digital tablets, it is becoming more important for us to understand how technologies fit into people lives as they go about their daily business. Tools for ethnographers have changed dramatically over the decades with smaller, cheaper, and easier to use technologies allowing capture of audio, image and film data to capture people's activities for later analysis. In this demonstration, we explore how sensor-based technologies can extend this toolkit further.