ICT support for gift giving

Abstract

Gift giving has far deeper societal, sociological, and psychological implications than people are generally aware of. It can work in both positive and negative ways — building and strengthening or weakening and breaking social ties, imposing identity images on both the givers and the recipients. Gifts are also important from a consumer and marketing perspective, and tend to cause their seekers anxiety in many ways.

To counter the difficulties in the gift giving process it is important to record information about important dates, recipients, given and received gifts, as well as new plans. Many tools are already being used to help keep track of gift giving, and these range from simple pen-and-paper solutions to productivity applications like note-taking tools and spreadsheets.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore gift giving behaviour and make use of the Technology Acceptance Model to triangulate requirements for a gift giving support application, as well as offer a list of possible design contributions to meet each requirement. These results can then be utilised in future research to design and produce an actual gift giving support application, that will meet the needs of both gift givers and recipients.