Promoting democracy and ‘good governance’ in developing countries have become core objectives of official development agencies, both bilateral and multilateral. Three main sets of questions arise from such ‘assistance’. Analytically, what is the underlying motive in promoting political reform, and what is the assumed relationship between such measures and economic liberalisation? Contextually, ...

In this paper I frame my past design research with the philosophical approaches of participatory design as outlined by Pelle Ehn in Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. The paper provides a series of related design techniques as exploration of interaction design methods and concludes by raising questions of methodologies research and evaluation. Author

There is limited guidance for conducting competent and responsive cross-cultural evaluation research with American Indian communities. The authors draw on Fisher and Ball's Tribal Participatory Research Model to highlight ways in which this project is attempting to be culturally appropriate and sensitive as they partner with an American Indian community to implement and evaluate a youth-based i...

This paper investigates why and how systems approaches can help in evaluating the design of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as social learning platforms. It focuses on the prototypes created by the research project Virtualis, whose objective is to promote social learning on environmental concepts and practices amongst a variety of stakeholders. The paper presents the princ...

Being one of the earliest electronic instruments the basic principles of the Theremin have often been used to design new musical interfaces. We present the structured design and evaluation of a set of 3D interfaces for a virtual Theremin, the VRemin. The variants differ in the size of the interaction space, the interface complexity, and the applied IO devices. We conducted a formal evaluation b...

This article describes the collective experience of a multidisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners, and program evaluators who support appropriate research and evaluation methods in working with Native peoples. Our experience underlines the critical importance of culture in understanding and conducting research with the diverse populations of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and ...