Sharable digital TV: relating ethnography to design through un-useless product suggestions

Abstract

The results presented here are part of an in depth study of current digital TV usage carried out for a manufacturer of domestic appliances. A systematic review of the literature revealed a set of issues that informed the design of an ethnographic study of five households of differing type. The concerns identified were then further explored through sketch-based conceptual designs, four of which are reported here. They are: (i) putting the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) onto a mobile phone to facilitate personalisation and to allow one person to use it while another is watching a programme; (ii) family voting to make explicit certain power relationships in the family and perhaps democratise them; (iii) using the TV for other purposes when not watching programs (e.g., as a message board or electronic picture frame) to avoid the ugliness of a blank TV screen, and (iv) multi-channel hopping to facilitate idly flicking through the channels. These suggestions are not fully worked designs but provocative concepts to relate the concerns identified to design. In this sense they are "un-useless" and draw on the playful and provocative tradition of chindogu.