A general approach to ethnographic analysis for systems design

  • Authors:
  • Rahat Iqbal;Richard Gatward;Anne James

  • Affiliations:
  • Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom;Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 23rd annual international conference on Design of communication: documenting & designing for pervasive information
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

An important aspect of designing for ubiquitous collaborating systems is addressing the needs of the culture in which the system is to be applied. The value of ethnographic analysis in this respect is gaining increasing acceptance. Such analysis provides a 'rich' and 'concrete' portrayal of the situation and thus helps systematic design of any system where collaboration and communication between actors is paramount. A discussion of these issues has recently been presented in [1]. This paper takes these issues further by considering 'EthnoModel' as an approach to generalisation of the method to any system demonstrating these features.