Social research for WAND and new media adoption on a local scale
Arianna Bassoli, Irene Quinn, Mark A Agius, Andrew Edward Moran, Valentina Nisi, P. Dini, Christina Quinlan · 2002
The WAND (Wireless Ad hoc Network for Dublin) project represents an attempt to understand how new ICT, Information and Communication Technologies, and applications can be optimised according to the socioeconomic and cultural characteristics of the local area in which they are introduced. The idea is to use social research methods during the innovation process in order to understand and to involve future users from the initial phase of the technology development. We believe that the user space, regarded here as a local population formed by different communities, can play an important role in the innovation process, especially through sociocultural emergent phenomena. The paper presents these ideas at the level of a conceptual model, and then reports on the social research we conducted in the Summer of 2002 in Dublin to inform the application development process for the WAND network.