Dr Simon Pulman-Jones and Dr Rick Robinson
NOP World Observational & Ethnographic Practice

Domestic ethnography at global scale: building a comparative visual database of domestic spaces around the world

Ethnographic studies of everyday domestic lives to inform product and service strategy and design are usually relatively small in scale and scope. The level of effort required to achieve the depth of contextual understanding to which ethnography aspires places practical limits on the number of participants or domestic contexts studied. But the product and design strategies of many global companies demand information delivered at a global scale to inform decisions about the optimal balance of global and localised design directions. Can the strengths of an ethnographic approach be delivered on a scale that will allow integration with the large-scale quantitative consumer information sources that set the agenda for much global product and service design strategy?

This paper describes an innovative attempt to provide just such a global ethnographic insight into domestic life. The Visual Survey of Domestic Spaces, fielded for the first time in 2005 by global market research company NOP World, is a detailed photographic documentation of the interiors of over 240 homes in 12 countries. Pictures of nine functional areas of each home will be accessible through a relational database linked to the information gathered through a large scale quantitative study of 30,000 people in 30 countries.