| Abstract |
A lack of cultural fit in design solutions has prevented design adoption and diffusion in many humanitarian engineering and global development efforts. Design requirements are developed to reflect the target user’s needs and product specifications. A lack of cultural fit in the design solutions suggests there may be a lack of details in the design requirements that prevents the requirements from conveying cultural information crucial to design success. Using an experimental case study approach, this study investigates the effects of the Cultural Element Requirement Assessment (CERA) on design requirement detail. CERA is a formal method that introduces culture when developing design requirements. The method was designed to improve cultural representation in design requirements. This study explores secondary effects of the method by investigating how it affects the level of detail in the design requirements developed. Using a control, experimental, and no treatment group, design requirements and the effects of CERA on design requirements post-intervention are captured. The level of detail in the design requirements is measured by assessing the structure of the requirements using sentence structure rules. The sentence structure rules include incomplete, simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound. Changes in design structure was measured weekly, pre- and post-intervention. The study shows how the sentence structure of requirements changes throughout a project as well as how the use of CERA affects the sentence structure of the design requirements. |
, Cameron J. Turner 
