Bringing the Virtual to the Farmers' Market: Designing for Trust in Pervasive Computing Systems

Since pervasive computing applications are mostly designed to enhance existing social situations, such applications should take account of the trust relationships within the situation in their design. In this paper we describe the ethnographic approach we used to explore how trust is formed and maintained within a farmers' market, and how this understanding can be applied in the design of supporting applications. We then evaluate the applications using the same ethnographic approach, uncovering problems which would not have been visible with other evaluation techniques.