Drawing upon James Carey's ritual model of communication as a framework, we argue that rituals, especially religious rituals, are important resources for technology design. We suggest that a ritual view of ICT interaction represents an alternative and significant model for ICT development and evaluation, and that the observance of religious rituals affords researchers the opportunity to see cultural values at the peak of their expression. To illustrate, we describe several examples and three case studies of religious rituals that involve technology. For each, we discuss the ritual's enactment, where and how it intersects with technology, and the broader cultural values it embodies. We conclude with remarks about how religious values are meaningful for the design of culturally relevant consumer technologies and we offer advice on how other researchers can use ritual observation to inform and inspire their technology designs.
The value of ethnographic field work for guiding and inspiring product design is indisputable, especially for development teams working on products for other cultures. However, global instability can make it difficult or impossible for researchers and product designers to travel to foreign countries to conduct field work, leaving them ill equipped to guide culturally-appropriate product design. In this paper, we present a series of ethnographically-inspired techniques that allow researchers and development teams to gather a range of culturally relevant information for product design without visiting the countries for which they are designing. These techniques are not intended to substitute for on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork, rather, they are intended to serve as a surrogate until further in-situ research can be conducted.
In this study, we explore the potential usefulness of disturbing, uncomfortable systems, demonstrating that provocative technology can have a positive effect on social relationships. We designed and evaluated an agent-based system that collects user information by asking seemingly benign questions, and then uses it to spread false, strange gossip throughout an office space.We show that provocative interaction on-line can improve off-line sociability.
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