Skip to content

Opening book details…

Can I read Domestic Artefacts: Sustainability in the Context of Indian Middle Class on EtoBox?

Domestic Artefacts: Sustainability in the Context of Indian Middle Class by Dhaval Vyas is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Domestic Artefacts: Sustainability in the Context of Indian Middle Class about?

Sustainability has become one of the important research topics in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). However, the majority of work has focused on the Western culture. In this paper, we explore sustainable household practices in the developing world. Our research draws on the results from an ethnographic field study of household women belonging to the so-called middle class in India. We analyze our results in the context of Blevis' [4] principles of sustainable interaction design (established within the Western culture), to extract the intercultural aspects that need to be considered for designing technologies. We present examples from the field that we term "domestic artefacts". Domestic artefacts represent creative and sustainable ways household women appropriate and adapt used objects to create more useful and enriching objects that support household members' everyday activities. Our results show that the rationale behind creating domestic artefacts is not limited to the practicality and usefulness, but it shows how religious beliefs, traditions, family intimacy, personal interests and health issues are incorporated into them.

Author
Dhaval Vyas
Publisher
ACM
Published
2012
Language
EN