B. Ethnographic Analysis Process

As our ethnographic study of this DSR project progressed, we integrated literature, especially Simon’s view of design as search, into the analysis of our design process. We observed that we were regularly redefining the problem, exploring potential solutions to that revised problem, and based on evaluations of those solutions, continuing to refine and improve our solutions, and at some point, revising the problem again. Combining our observations with Simon’s view of design as search, as well as Hevner et al.’s guideline 6 for DSR [2], led us to focus on design as search. This focus, in turn, led us to analyze our process in terms of the problem and solution spaces that we were searching. Searching necessarily involves frequent evaluations to determine which problems and solutions to explore further or to drop. Focusing on the challenges of design as search and how that changed evaluation enabled us to articulate our design process more clearly, in particular to articulate it as a process involving the co-evolution of problem and solution spaces, and the management of that co-evolution process through frequent small evaluations.

The ethnographic study of our design process produced a rich description of our search process. From that description, we were able to articulate and abstract the search process that we needed to use as a process that others can follow, thus going beyond merely describing our process. We also recognized that our proposed new process was an extension of current DSR methodologies, which have many valuable components that can continue to be used as is, especially for the more routine parts of a design problem.

We present the results of our ethnographic analysis in Sections IV and V below. Each section focuses on one of the two design challenges, Section IV on the need for an elaborate search process and Section V on the need to rethink the purpose of evalution. Each provides solutions and recommendations discovered during our study. These two challenges were frequently evident as we designed, developed, and evaluated smartphone apps over the last decade to support chronic disease management, specifically type 2 diabetes and chronic wounds.