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.