When in Rome... Be Yourself: A Perspective on Dealing with Cultural Dissimilarities in Ethnography

With the 'flattening' of the world, increasingly, our design research teams are called upon to execute projects in cultures that are foreign to them. Design research involves deep dive ethnography that needs to be carried out in a relatively short span of time. It is in these design ethnography studies that we have realized the impact of cultural difference between the researchers and the researched. This paper attempts to discuss our findings on the subject.