Communication Patterns in Domestic Life: Preliminary Ethnographic Study

Introduction Despite a range of communication technologies available today, we feel that families have difficulties managing everyday communication and subsequently the relationships with members that are temporally or spatially distributed. There is a dearth of research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to understand domestic communication patterns and conduct socially informed design in such settings. The literature in social anthropology informs us about the complex notions of family and household and patterns of domestic interaction. We need ethnographic methods for conducting social research related to communication patterns in such settings. Ethnographic approaches allow us to observe and interview people in their naturalistic settings to discover their personal experience, social attitudes and relations [Lofland84].