DIANE J. SCHIANO, AME ELLIOTT and VICTORIA BELLOTTI In a series of studies (including interviews, observations, surveys and focus groups), we explored the leisure practices of young adults in Tokyo. After initial fieldwork with a wide age-range of participants, we narrowed our focus to 19-25 year olds, who have more leisure time and for whom leisure activities hold greater significance. In this paper, we briefly characterize these transitional “golden years” between cram school and career in Japan, and illustrate how a grounded understanding of leisure preferences and patterns can help suggest issues and opportunities for design....

AME ELLIOTT and BRINDA DALAL This paper reports on how people express health concerns as they move around their homes and travel between their homes and workplaces, stores, gyms, restaurants, friends’ homes, hotels and other locations. We gathered stories from focus groups and in-home interviews with people with a broad range of health needs, and from these discussions, support for mobility emerged as a key issue for making health maintenance routines easy and resilient in the face of disruptions. The things people carry with them and access at strategic places help them maintain their health routines in the face of stressful and unforeseen situations....

AME ELLIOTT Physical artifacts, such as sticky notes and mock-ups, are widely used in Human-Computer Interaction research for supporting the collaborative design of technology. Because these representations use channels of communication other than speaking and listening, they offer the potential to facilitate collaboration in bilingual groups working through an interpreter. This paper identifies challenges of bilingual design meetings based on technology development collaborations between Silicon Valley corporate research organizations and two different Japanese companies. Three of the most successful physical artifacts used in these meetings are described to illustrate ways of supporting bilingual collaboration. After discussion of the specific contributions of these artifacts, general recommendations for bilingual collaborative design meetings are discussed. The paper concludes with the recommendation that careful choreography of the work area is necessary to ensure every participant has access to the physical artifacts necessary...

ELIZABETH CHURCHILL and AME ELLIOTT This paper discusses two distinguishing features of ethnographic work, program flexibility and data flexibility. These forms of flexibility deliver business benefits at two different timeframes. Within the timeframe of a given project, ethnographic practice is necessarily reflective and reflexive; ethnographic training insists researchers be flexible. This means projects are responsive to emerging results, and can be reframed in situ without significant additional investment. After the project has completed, carefully managed, stored and curated ethnographic materials can answer new questions, perhaps posed years after the project has ended. Thus, ethnographic work can generate business impact by sustaining value over time. Two cases illustrate the value-generating qualities of ethnographic work: one recently conducted investigation of drinking water in India and one conducted ten years ago looking at changes in collaborative practices as a result of the adoption of mobile technologies. Discussion...