Even the most cursory glance through recent proceedings of the biannual participatory design conference shows that ethnography is becoming an increasingly widespread technique in work-oriented design. This paper (1) explicates the rationale behind participatory design’s ‘turn to ethnography’; (2) identifies central problems with the technique’s employment from participatory design’s point of vi...

Büchi’s theorem, in establishing the equivalence between languages definable in S1S over pP,ăq and the ω-regular languages also demonstrated that S1S over pP,ăq is no more expressive than its existential fragment. It is also easy to see that S1S over pP,ăq is equi-expressive with S1S over pP, sq. However, it is not immediately obvious whether it is possible to adapt Büchi’s argument to establis...

In this article, the authors provide an account of Carspecken's (1996) five-stage approach to "doing" critical ethnography, or what he has termed critical qualitative research (CQR). They provide the reader with an overview of the concepts presented in Carspecken's book Critical Ethnography in Educational Research and describe how they applied several of his ideas within a research project that...

This article presents an exploratory research based on the virtual ethnography from an environment of research and learning including new technologies. The ethnography is a method of qualitative research of social sciences that is mainly used in the socio-cultural Anthropology, where it has its theoretical basis. The target was to explore the web 2.0 and its tools. The process of participant ob...

Design science research (DSR) is a relatively new approach in information systems research. A fundamental tenet of DSR is that understanding comes from creating information technology artifacts. However, with an increasingly connected and globalized world, designing IT artifacts for a multicultural world is a challenge. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to propose extending the DSR metho...

ions. The choice of an precise topic for investigation, therefore, is an important part of the preparation for fieldwork. One should, at the very least, know if one is interested in, say, resource management or child-raising before embarking on fieldwork. Otherwise one will end up knowing too little about everything rather than knowing enough about something. Godfrey Lienhardt (1985), borrowing...

During the course of ethnomedicinal investigations in Andhra Pradesh some interesting indigenous medicinal plants have been reported for the treatment of paralysis amongst sugalis. Firsthand information was gathered through persona interviews with local in habitats. Apart from this a note on the ethnography of the tribe is discussed.

In this paper we describe how ongoing work with ethnographic material in a participatory innovation sets the scene for innovation to happen. We elaborate on how actionable formats of ethnographic material have been mediated to industrial partners with a stake in an innovation project. We illustrate how the stakeholders engaged in activities such as sense-making, co-analysis, and cross-compariso...