Ethnographic research is increasingly figured as a foundation for design practice, but the questions of just how these two approaches should be combined remain largely unanswered. In particular, designers often turn to ethnographic work more for marketing data than for cultural understandings. Drawing on some recent studies of mobility and privacy, I will outline an alternative approach that attempts to take ethnography seriously.

Paul Dourish has worked at Apple and at Xerox PARC, and is currently a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of computer science and social science, and he is known particularly for his research in the areas of Ubiquitous Computing, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Human-Computer Interaction.

His book, "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction" was published by MIT Press in 2001; it explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the embodied experience of interactive and computational systems. He is currently on sabbatical at Stanford, working on book projects on social informatics and cultural aspects of ubiquitous computing.