Clarifying culture in technology design: what, why, and how we think about it

Culture influences our way to perceive the world, to interact with it. To inform technology design with cultural aspects, we model our reality in three levels: technical, where the artefacts are; formal, where existing rules shape our behaviour; and informal, composed by values, beliefs and other aspects that influence how we perceive the world. We can promote a social change, redefining a community, by introducing new technology at the technical level. This is how and why we understand the importance of culture in design. In this paper, we present an overview of our design perspective under the Socially Aware approach, and illustrate this understanding applied to two case studies of design informed by sociocultural aspects.