Towards a Culturally Aware Design for Social Software

2013

Requirements engineering is a key activity in systems development. This pa - per examines six systems development projects that have used end user development (EUD) as a requirements engineering technique for communicating across social worlds. For this purpose, we employed the theoretical lens of design boundary object in order to focus on functional and political ecologies during the development process. Four fea - tures were investigated: (1) the capability for common representation, (2) the capabil - ity to transform design knowledge, (3) the capability to mobilise for design action, and (4) the capability to legitimise design knowledge across social worlds. We concluded that EUD means a high degree of end user involvement and takes advantage of end us- ers' know-how. It has the ability to capture requirements and transfer them into the fi - nal information system without the need to make an explicit design rationale available to the systems developers. However, systems deve...

2009

The modern Internet world is enriched with social software, often referred to as Web2. 0 [O'Rel05]: YouTube, Flickr and FaceBook are some of the most famous examples. Social software bears some special characteristics. One is the shift of the focus from technology to the user. Users increasingly play the central role in the design of such systems. A second characteristic is the self-organization of Web 2.0 technologies.

International Journal for Infonomics, 2013

Evaluating interactive systems is becoming an increasingly complex challenge. As information and communication technology have left the context of offices and workplaces to pervade every aspect of people's personal and social lives, issues such as emotional and affective aspects, sociability, culture and human values are now in play and must be explicitly considered. This situation is very different from what designers and researchers have experienced before, and requires new methods, techniques and tools to support them in producing solutions aligned with the new demands of a digital age. In this paper we focus on values and culture in the evaluation of interactive systems, presenting the eValuean artifact we created to support designers in a culturally informed and value-oriented evaluation. To situate our discussion in a practical context, we present a case study where the artifact was used to evaluate seven prototypes of social applications for the Brazilian Interactive Digital Television.

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories, the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users" cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya.

… , Design and Global …, 2009

1 Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, AL 36849 eugenwa@auburn.edu 2 College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 leshell@umd.edu 3 Computer Science Department, University of ...

ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 1996

Many software applications marketed outside the country of origin are internationalised and/or localised. In this article, I propose a strategy to localise the software by creating Cultural User Interface a (CUI) for each of the target cultures. A CUI is a user interface that is intuitive to a particular culture. The CUI takes advantage of the shared or common knowledge of a culture which could be defined by country boundaries, language, cultural conventions, race, shared activities or workplace. An application that is CUI-enabled allows the use of many different CUIs. These different CUIs are developed collaboratively with the target cultures, thus problems associated with localisation such as misinterpretation of elements in the CUIs, are unlikely to occur. A CUI can be used not only for one application but for a range of applications.Most software developers have accepted the fact that it is worthwhile economically to internationalise their software. This trend is evident in the ...

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the purpose of a prospective software system, by identifying stakeholders and their needs, and documenting these in a form that is suitable to analysis, communication, and subsequent implementation. Requirements elicitation is closely related and even interleaved to other RE activities such as: modeling, analysis & negotiation, and communication of requirements. RE is a multidisciplinary and human-centered activity. This paper presents a participatory approach to requirements elicitation that deals with functional and non-functional requirements considering social, political, cultural and ethical issues involved in understanding the problem in the process of RE. The proposed approach is theoretically grounded in methods and models from Organizational Semiotics. The proposed approach is illustrated with a case study related to the development of an application of Geographical Information Systems in the Web (Web GIS). Results of the case study allowed us to observe the contribution of OS in the proposed approach, including elements to inform the user interface design of the system.

1995

In this paper we argue that the industrial development of interactive systems has to recognise the social dimension of work if these systems are to fully meet the real needs of their users. Under current approaches this depends on whether an individual requirements engineer implicitly applies a user-centred approach, recognises the importance of cooperation and is sufficiently sympathetic and intuitive to understand the work and reflect this in the system requirements. We wish to move beyond this by allowing for the provision of a more systematic incorporation of the social dimensions of work. To this end we focus on developing a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic material. Our approach is based on the use of number of viewpoints and is embodied within a general hypertext tool.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

This paper presents research carried out to explore the implications of giving users a specific vocabulary to express their perceptions and opinions about opportunities to make contact with cultural diversity in human-computer interaction. This two-step study is part of a broader research project that aims at investigating users' perceptions and reactions when interacting with crosscultural systems. Our current findings point at the expressive power of the proposed vocabulary and the promising outcomes of using it in the interaction design cycle of cross-cultural systems.

2012

Identifying, understanding and explicitly involving values and cultural aspects of stakeholders have been regarded as a challenge in the design of interactive systems. There is still a lack of principled and lightweight artifacts, methods and tools for supporting designers in this task. In this paper we propose two artifacts for supporting designers in making explicit both stakeholders' values and system's requirements taking these values into account. A case study reports the use of the artifacts in the design of seven prototypes of applications for the Brazilian Interactive Digital Television. The artifacts showed to be promising for supporting designers in the complex scenario of designing value-oriented and culturally aware interactive systems.