La moral y los valores vistos por los niños y adolescentes

4Dev designers [58,101,124] have applied a traditional user-centric approach to good effect.

Their approach can be described as empathic UCD [86], in that it requires designers to immerse themselves within the intended context of use to develop an appreciation for local problems and needs.

One popular method is to use contextual design and to execute a contextual inquiry (CI). A CI suggests using observational and interview techniques to learn about the target users and their daily lives. The scope of a CI can be extended to appreciate a wider range of factors, but it remains the designer’s responsibility to consolidate the contextual findings and to generate a

set of requirements. The designer, at this point, has to make a commitment to a problem to be addressed. Once this has been made, it is becomes difficult to move between problem spaces (design pathways) unless the designer explores more than one. Tohidi et al. [154] believe such approaches don’t sufficiently emphasise the importance of exploring multiple design alternatives in the early stages of the design process – in most cases industrial time constraints simply won’t allow it.

To reduce the risk associated with committing to an incorrect design path, user centred designers typically adopt an iterative approach and low cost, low-fidelity prototyping to explore the problem space. The difficulty for 4Dev designers is that low-fidelity prototypes often contain ambiguous elements and are open to multiple interpretations. Their effectiveness, as a 4Dev design tool, is largely dependent on the designer being able to foster a solid participatory environment, which in turn requires a solid design communication foundation. But there are often language and cultural barriers between designer and user, making it difficult to establish a working participatory design environment. Failure to establish such an environment may result in the user being unaware of the purpose of the design process and their role in it. The underlying design concept may thus remain untested until late in the design process, and ultimately an inappropriate final product may be produced.

Another shortcoming of empathic UCD is that, even if a designer does explore and persist down an inappropriate design path, the final solution may still satisfy the given requirements specification. This is due to the narrow scope of user-centric evaluative techniques. Quality is verified within the immediate interaction space, without considering the broad context of use and the associated forces at work. Evaluative techniques within the 4Dev space, on the other hand, tend to focus on impact measurements at a much higher level, leaving a gap in the evaluative spectrum of traditional UCD. The Human Centred Design (HCD) handbook from IDEO [72] presents a single evaluative process that describes how micro-level evaluative methods and macro-level evaluative frameworks can work together.

To summarise, an empathic user-centred approach has several benefits:

1. It encourages the designer to develop a deeper understanding of the local context and not to rely on assumptions.

2. It provides the possibility of discovering unique design pathways and practical

ways of applying technology to daily life.

3. It allows the design process to execute even if the design team is unable to find, or prevented from finding, a suitable project partner within the community.

It also has several shortcomings:

1. It requires a design team with suitable ethnographic skills.

2. It requires extensive time in the field to gather contextual data.

3. The design team interprets the contextual data and chooses the problem or need that the technology will attempt to address.

4. A high fidelity version of the designed solution is often deployed only late in the process. The wider social impact of the deployed technology may thus only be realised late in the design process [134].

Technology probes address several of these shortcomings by drawing out local perspectives on the deployed technology as early as possible. In most cases the technology will be a novelty that will, as Ramachandran et al. put it, “create a buzz in the community” [134]. The designer is able to start learning about the wider impact of the technology immediately, and can begin to build a participatory design environment around the probe. The community’s experience of the probe then serves as a catalyst for design communication, local resource development and the extraction of local knowledge and skills. The designer is able to extract ideas and observe emergent usage patterns before choosing a future design direction.

Since several design ideas may emerge, it is the designer's role to choose a design pathway that will result in a solution that will have the most impact. Hopefully an idea with a notable livelihoods impact will emerge -- but there is no guarantee of this occurring, due to the limited scope of the technology probe. At present, there are no techniques available, apart from Gaver’s [53] polyphonic assessments, for measuring the effectiveness and impact of a technology probe. This is primarily due to it being an explorative tool without any defined user goals or quality metrics to measure against.

In summary, the benefits of a technology probing approach to design are:

1. It deploys a technology prototype early on in the design process so that the wider impact of the technology is revealed at an early stage.

2. It reduces ambiguity through a direct demonstration of a technology’s utility.

3. It serves as a catalyst and provides a common platform for design communication.

4. It has the ability to generate a buzz within the community, allowing the designers to meet interested parties who could become design intermediaries.

Its shortcomings include:

1. Technology probes may create expectations that need to be carefully managed.

2. It is challenging to measure the effectiveness of a technology probe.

3. It requires careful partner selection.

4. The design direction is heavily influenced by the technology. Important livelihoods needs may be overlooked due to the narrowing of the scope.

Technology probing is a promising technique that will be explored in this thesis, evaluated alongside a more traditional, empathic UCD approach. In the next chapter we will describe the research design and methodologies used, before moving on to detailed accounts of the application of each method in Chapters 4 and 5.

3 Research design and methodology

This chapter describes the design of the research and the methods and practical tools used to address the research questions presented in the Introduction. Recall the primary intention of this research: To assess the suitability of different UCD processes, tools and techniques in a developing-world context, by actually attempting to design appropriate ICTs.

The literature review presented the two alternative UCD processes that will be applied. The first leverages an empathic [86] approach to user-centred design. The second uses a technology probe to extract user perspectives on a technology experience. As well as describing research methods and design, this chapter also describes the methodologies, tools and techniques used to design and evaluate the resultant artefacts.

The chapter begins with an overview of Design Research, the overarching framework for the current research.