Designing for cultural connections

Abstract

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti not only devastated the country's infrastructure, it also left many orphaned children, which accelerated the pace of international transracial adoptions by families in the United States and other developed countries. While international adoptees such as these Haitian children are older and will therefore likely remember some aspects of their birth culture, often younger children are at risk of forgetting much of their cultural and linguistic heritage. Despite much research on international transracial adoptions, surprisingly few web-based resources are available to adoptees for exploring and connecting with their birth cultures. To address this shortcoming, we used an iterative approach of ethnographic methods, paper prototypes, usability testing and heuristic evaluations to design Synergy, a system which allows adoptees to explore and connect with their birth cultures and its people autonomously. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.