Adapting Ethnography for Design Research: Lessons Learnt from Design of Mobile Systems for Rural Health Care in Ethiopia

This paper attempts to address how ethnography can be adapted and customized to design research for software development in resource constrained social settings. Based on the experience from the Technology Enabled Maternal and Child Health Care (TEMACC-Ethiopia) research project, the work reported demonstrates the suitability of a modified ethnography in a design research particularly in mediating the communication between users and programmers, facilitating reflection and communication among users, programmers and stakeholders, transforming field study insights into design artefacts, testing and deploying software tools as well as supporting users in their work places. The practical guidelines that emerged in the course of the research work are presented as lessons learnt. Extending the ethnography to support usability assessment and change management beyond those conducted in this study are also identified for further research.