The patterns highlight recurring features of home life that we found from our studies. These can be used by designers of new technologies.

Volunteers are given collections of evocative tasks to complete over time. The aim is to elicit inspirational responses as inputs for design. We have extended this approach to include new materials and for gathering information as a kind of "ethnography-at-a-distance."

'In the wild' events help drive innovation through the staging of experiences in real world settings and dealing with real world constraints.

Used to understand the issues raised during events. Events raise challenges for how ethnography can integrate data distributed across space and time and between the physical and digital worlds.

These uncover new issues of longer term deployments in everyday settings and pose challenges for how to gather data around devices that may be used only very occasionally.

Documentaries and feature articles are commissioned to provide insights into how our systems are interpreted outside the lab.

The most long-standing virtual humans have been built as accompaniments to computer games. The similarities between these humanoids and the ones built to inhabit virtual worlds end skin deep. In the case, of computer games, the virtual humans need only convey a few traits and have little functionality. However, today's virtual beings have to be able to communicate with users in a convincing fashion. The problem is that human communication remains an immensely complicated function to model computationally.

"Playing chess is easy, but making breakfast is enormously complicated. This complexity stares us in the face every morning, yet it is invisible." - Phil Agre, 1985

Synchronised playbacks of logs of system operation and recordings of user activity support the synergistic combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to analysis.