Teaching Semantic Ethnography to Architecture Students

Learning about human behavior, cultural diversity, and user perspectives are all part of the NAAB-required curriculum for educating architects. Beyond that, these skills help architects compete in a global and diverse world. Semantic ethnography offers a method for understanding the user perspective in cultural settings. We present a research and design project centered on semantic ethnography as a way to teach architecture students about how to design for user groups. A survey administered to two years of students indicates that this project is indeed helpful for teaching students about how to find and listen to the user perspective.

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