FM: A journalist in Wired recently said, "If cultural anthropologists could write, a lot of journalists would have to find other work." Doesn't the turgid style of ethnographies mean that they don't communicate well to product designers, marketers and others who could use the information they contain?

Yes! I am working with my colleague Brian Reilly at Apple on a multimedia ethnography (on a CD). We want to pioneer a new, more accessible form of ethnography that is rich visually and textually. Other researchers are tackling the communication problem by trying to write compelling narratives. But they miss the whole visual end and they are going to find that playwrights and novelists beat them at that game. Film has impact but by itself it's way too linear and doesn't afford the scope for a good old fashioned argument in words. Words in a row, as Bruce Sterling says, are a great tool. Multimedia exploits each medium for its own strengths and good multimedia weaves them together seamlessly. The CD we're doing now is about a digital photography class at Lincoln High School in San Jose, California that we spent months studying. We have the beautiful artwork the students did, every handout the teacher provided, videos of the class, digital photos, some QuickTime VR and lots of audio interviews. Plus our own reflections on what happened in the class. It will be a very detailed resource for teachers, a record of what is possible when kids have great