Cultural Appropriation of Software Design and Evaluation

Abstract

Communities all over the world have established their own value systems which do not necessarily correlate with the intrinsic values of technology. The account of internationalization and localization of information technology reveals that an abstraction of the receiving societies’ culture leads to the design of unusable and unwanted socio-technical systems. Cross-cultural research extrapolates major challenges of current development practices. Longtime established methods, understandings of quality concepts, and metrics of socio-technical systems can no longer be assumed to be universals. Thus the author argues that as much as the design of socio-technical systems has to be synchronized with the target community so does the design and evaluation process itself as well as the underlying quality concepts. Empirical research in the design of information and decision support systems in the Namibian context demonstrates the need for a change of paradigm in socio-technical system design and supports the presented culture-driven design framework.