What can ethnographical research reveal about the people's use of technologies that classical marketing studies miss? This is the question for which Yonghee Jung and Genevieve Bell, both anthropologists working in design teams for two high tech companies, have offered some answers. Paul Dourish, as the academic anthropologist has somewhat played the devil's advocate by pointing out that such "design ethnographies" also have weak points, that should be taken into account.

Yonghee Jung showed how people can get emotionally and even symbolically involved with the mobile technologies of their daily lives. She took as example one of the projects of her design team, called Nokia Open Studio (NOS), as an example of this phenomenon. The NOS aimed at putting people back at the heart of technology design by sending anthropologists to actually ask them what kind of mobile phone would be most useful to them. Three teams were sent for 2 weeks in three different communities: one in Mumbai, India, another in Rio, Brazil and a third in Accra, capital of Ghana. Since the time they had at hand was short, they mixed several methods (ethnography, street surveys and group meetings) to maximize their capacity to get as much insights from these people as possible. They offered these people to design the mobile phone of their dream and offered an award to the best one. It allowed the NOS team to analyze how these people understand what mobile phone are meant for, how they should be used and what specific needs related to their daily routine they should fullfill.

Genevieve Bell offered other insights into the field of "design ethnography", by showing how it can help the technology designers understand how people adapt their use of a technology with regards to cultural ideals and their perception of what is allowed and what is forbidden. Taking the example of a research on the notion of lie and secret, she showed that digital technologies can become deception technologies, in which people play with their identity and self-representations. Refering to recent literature about the issue of the so-called "transparency", often understood as a universal and full access to all information and knowledge, considered as the main elements for the search for truth, she was able to describe how people articulate this cultural ideal within their own experience and command of digital technologies. This is in line with the underlying discourses about these technologies where the role given to them is to allow us to know the truth or facts about everything or everyone anytime, meaning that on the other side of the coins, there will be attempt to distort the truth through hiding and lying. Therefore, the antagonism of truth/deception, secrecy/openess and privacy/public life have always been at their core. The approach of people's use of digital technologies through the lens of their relationships to lie and secret has therefore allowed Intel designers to address the issues of data safety and people's privacy from a much richer perspective than a mere technodeterministic (technology defines behavior) point of view.

However, as Paul Dourish points out in his own presentation, "design ethnography", with its focus on technology and their use in daily routine, runs the risk to miss out important symbolical and cultural elements from the larger picture. He showed in his presentation how an ethnographical fiedlwork that is too narrowly defined around the purely materialistic aspects of people's life leave out all the issues of social and cultural legitimacy and appropriatedness that can as much define people's use of a device as its technical design. To him, the issue shouldn't be just a highly customized design of a technology like the mobile phone to fit exactly needs that can be perceived as specific within communities, but also to relate these findings to the values and symbols of social status and spirituality that can be materialized in these technological behaviors. He therefore suggests that design ethnographers should take more into accounts the issues of frame and concept definitions and how they relate to implications that belong to the larger socio-cultural frame. In other words, he argues that classical ethnography shouldn't represent simply a more refined tool to understand consumers than marketing, but as a real bridge between people as social being belonging to a cultural context and the industry producing technologies for them.