Using digital technology for collective ethnographic observation: an experiment on ‘coming home’

Abstract

In this article, we use digital technologies (the Subcam and Webdiver) to capture, share and analyze collectively specific user experience. We examine the transition between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ when people come home, and the steps needed to build the ‘being-at-home’ feeling. Understanding what ‘being at home’ means for the subject is part of our larger project of analyzing the impact of home automation. We provide a model which describes the relation between the home and its inhabitant as instrumental ‘functional coupling’, which, when achieved, provides the ‘at home’ feeling. This article illustrates how digital tools can make the ethnographic approach a collaborative analysis of human experience.