Designing with ethnography: An integrative approach to CSCW design

This paper presents a part of wider research endeavor within the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) to leverage the use of ethnography for systems design. It investigates the role of ethnography in the development of CSCW systems and its relevance to real world problems, particularly, to uncover the social organisation of work practices. The usage of ethnography to inform CSCW design constitutes many challenges to systems design. The most significant of these design challenges is the inevitable need for well-established methods for applying the ethnography within CSCW to inform systems design. We have developed an integrative approach based on ethnography and meta-modelling for use in the context of CSCW research and practice. We have also applied this approach to the analysis of cooperative work in the academic domain of investigation.