Sustainable kiosk development utilising culturally adaptive user interfaces and a novel interaction method

Information kiosks are an important tool for delivering the benefits of information technol- ogy across cultures, particularly in the developing world. Despite kiosk initiatives being launched to help the poor in developing countries, in reality the poorest members of these communities are rarely able to gain access to kiosks as owner operators are entrepre- neurs that face a trade-off between the business viability of providing access to information kiosks and serving the poor. Compounding this issue of restricted kiosk access is the fact that websites are often localised unsuccessfully thereby excluding users from mixed cul- tural backgrounds, or worse still, not localised at all due to prohibitive schedules and mon- etary constraints. This thesis describes a culturally adaptive sustainable information kiosk that has been designed to be adaptable to local cultures and environments in order to de- mocratise the dissemination of information by making it universally consumable. This adaptability presents itself not only in the form of an automatically reconfigurable on- screen user interface but also in the form of physical multi modal interactions (‘gestures’). This study placed importance on investigating non-traditional forms of input methods due to the fact that the familiarity, in the western world, with traditional input methods such as a keyboard and mouse, and even the Windows Icons Menus Pointers (WIMP) paradigm as a whole, is not a trait necessarily shared with other cultures around the world