This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the ...

ion from or analytic reduction of the communication process. While the rules perspective tends to make a single analytic reduction of normative and cultural processes in formulating rules (or norms as discussed above), the ethnographic perspective makes two analytic reductions in the analysis of normative and cultural processes, norms and cultural codes, respectively.

This position paper introduces MEDIATE, an objectoriented development framework that furnishes basic, common services for flexible interaction management of multimedia-supported co-operative work. Motivated by requirements elicited from several ethnographies, MEDIATE offers a fully replicated architecture for distributed switching of multimedia streams. The result is a simple, versatile, and mo...

What has come to be termed the ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) (Gee, 1991; Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focussing not so much on literacy as a ‘technology of the mind’ (cf Goody, 1968, 1977) or as a set of skills, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1984). This entails the recognition of multiple literaci...

The doctor-patient interaction (DPI) plays an important role in the way patients view physicians. Thus, response to the question of ''Who is a great physician?'' is related to DPI experiences of patients. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore patients' views regarding this subject. Based on critical ethnography in one educational hospital in Shiraz, Iran, the study was performed base...

When conducting ethics research with children in health care settings, studying children's experiences is essential, but so is the context in which these experiences happen and their meaning. Using Charles Taylor's hermeneutic philosophy, we developed a methodological framework for health ethics research with children that bridges key aspects of ethnography, participatory research, and hermeneu...

We describe ethnomethodologically informed ethnography as a methodology for information science research, illustrating it with the results of a study in a university library. We consider the issues that arise in coordinating the results of this research with the needs of information systems designers. As well as showing how ethnography can be used to inform systems design, this also carries imp...