Weaving spatial, digital and ethnographic processes in community-driven media design

How can digital media be designed to counter the ruptures of lost cultural memory and spatial fragmentation? This dissertation provides answers to this critical question by tntegrating ethnography with digital system design.; In this dissertation, I tell the story and show the means by which Tribal Peace, a new community system I have developed as part of my research with the 19 Native American reservations of San Diego County. I situate the development of the Tribal Peace system and the sociocultural process that has accompanied it within the landscape of theories and developments in architectural and urban theory, cultural and social scientific studies, and digital design and algorithms. I present this dissertation as a piece of unprecedented interdisciplinary research that can pave the way for future efforts in community and culturally-driven digital system design.; The key contributions of this dissertation includes: (i) examination of how a digital media system can be designed on social, metaphorical, and ontological levels by a dispersed community of Native American reservations that previously have maintained little contact with such technologies; (ii) An understanding of how to visit theories and understandings of public space in a culturally-differentiated and digitally-mediated set of contexts; (iii) putting forth a new model of technological appropriation, where Native American communities can utilize and design their own technologies to create, archive, and communicate amongst one another. This model may serve to counter disturbing historical dynamics that have razed their people of their cultural histories and traditions and placed them amongst a series of dispersed and disconnected reservations.