Values and cultural aspects in design: Artifacts for making them explicit in design activities

Abstract

Values and cultural aspects must be considered for providing design solutions that make sense to people. Although there is influential literature work devoted to the subject of values and culture in design, there is still a lack of principled and light-weighted artifacts and methods to support designers in this task. In this paper we propose two artifacts for supporting designers in making explicit both stakeholders’ values and system’s requirements in design. We situate our discussion in a case study where the artifacts were used to support the design of seven prototypes of applications for Interactive Digital Television in the Brazilian context. The results were promising and indicated the artifacts’ usefulness to support designers in dealing with values and cultural aspects in design activities.