View article

We take two paradigms for information systems development, functionalism and social relativism, and apply their assumptions to the evaluation of ambient information systems. Ambient information Systems research, we posit, comes from two distinct paradigms and this has confounded a single evaluation framework from emerging. Instead, different groups of researchers have specific (if implicit) philosophical commitments about people and the social world, and these commitments have led to two research paradigms. We explain our view of these evaluation paradigms, and note a single area of focus for each evaluation framework. For functionalist evaluations, the questions circle around what to measure (and how to measure). For social relativist evaluations, the questions are practical but also theoretical; are we even asking the right questions? If so, how could we answer them?