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Implications for design

Published: 22 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the criteria by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2006
    1353 pages
    ISBN:1595933727
    DOI:10.1145/1124772
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    Published: 22 April 2006

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    1. design
    2. ethnography

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    April 22 - 27, 2006
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