A general approach to ethnographic analysis for systems design

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.

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