Beyond “yesterday’s tomorrow”: future-focused mobile interaction design by and for emergent users

Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long envisioned future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of alternative propositions with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term explorations are uncommon for what have been termed emergent users; users, that is, for whom advanced technologies are just within grasp. Rather, a driving assumption is that today’s high-end mobile technologies will “trickle down” to these user groups in due course. In this paper, we open the debate about what mobile technologies might be like if emergent users were directly involved in creating their visions for the future 5–10 years from now. To do this, we report on a set of envisioning workshops in India, South Africa and Kenya that provide a roadmap for valued, effective devices and services for these regions in the next decade. © 2016, The Author(s)

Applying ICT to solve complex WASH challenges: insights and early lessons from the water and health sectors

There are growing expectations that harnessing ICT intelligently can bring about radical improvements in the way that health, education and other sectors function, particularly in developing countries. There is also quite some interest in the water sector, which until now has been more conservative in its innovation, with a growing recognition that these new tools can perhaps help with the institutional challenges that bedevil the water and sanitation sector. To examine experience to date – and to help the water sector learn from other sectors – two South African-based organisations active in this sphere, SeeSaw and iComms, convened a multi-disciplinary learning and sharing workshop in Cape Town in 2012. This paper summarises the background to those discussions, gives an overview of the open sharing of experience that took place, and provides some early lessons for those in the WASH sector that plan to harness some of the emerging ICT tools

The Quality of Big Data: Development, Problems, and Possibilities of Use of Process-Generated Data in the Digital Age

The paper introduces the HSR Forum on digital data by discussing what big data are. The authors show that big data are not a new type of social science data but actually one of the oldest forms of social science data. In addition, big data are not necessarily digital data. Regardless, current methodological debates often assume that “big data” are “digital data.” The authors thus also show that digital data have a big drawback concerning data quality because they do not cover the whole population – due to so-called digital divides, not everybody is on the internet, and who is on the internet, is socially structured. The result is a selection bias. Based on this analysis, the paper concludes that big data and digital data are data like any other type of data – they have both advantages and specific blind spots. So rather than glorifying or demonising them, it seems much more sensible to discuss which specific advantages and drawbacks they have as well as when and how they are better suited for answering specific research questions and when and how other types of data are better suited – these are the questions that are addressed in this HSR Forum

Critical Evaluation of a Smart-phone Movie Project for University Students

Smart-phone movies were utilized for examinations at Kyungpook National University, Sangju Campus for the Freshman English Second Language course, and the results were analyzed. Students employed many movie genres: religious influences; sports; reality; news; factual; sitcom; police procedural; horror; traditional fantasy legends; slice of life; military; science fiction; romance; Bildungroman; gangster; instructional genre; and disaster genre. They worked many hours outside the class producing short English movies with enjoyment. Written content and performance were important for exams. The teacher, as a DSL (Digital Second Language) generation person, was surprised by the DFL (Digital First Language) generation producers. Even though the smart-phone is an excellent motivational tool for young learners, yet looking at the necessity for them to develop a proper philosophy of life one must be aware of the danger to prioritize image above text since it has cognitive implications for the long-term memory and creative aspects of the brain. The future successful teacher will utilize the mobile-learning utility to make them research with electrical-learning tools enabling them to self-construct through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction with cognitive sensitivity fulfilling the old traditional behavioristic objectives. A literature review notably revealed an upsurge of related studies by Korean scholars recently

An investigation into the feasibility and potential benefits of shared taxi services to commuter stations

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Direct Digital Engagement of Patients and Democratizing Health Care

Direct Digital Engagement of Patients and Democratizing Health Car

Monitoring and assessing land degradation: new approaches

This chapter examines land degradation in southern Africa. The focus is on the major issue of erosion by water at scales ranging from a few square metres to assessments that aim to cover the whole region. Approaches to measure and reconstruct both current and historical erosion rates are considered, focusing on the period since the arrival of Europeans who brought many of their farming and management practices with them. In most parts of the country, the impact of humans on the landscape has been clear for the last 200 years. This is referred to as ’accelerated erosion’, i.e., erosion at rates that are above the natural geological norm for the current climatic conditions. The chapter considers a range of techniques including direct measurement, remote sensing, fingerprinting and modelling as approaches to the monitoring and assess land degradation

Direct Digital Engagement of Patients and Democratizing Health Care

Direct Digital Engagement of Patients and Democratizing Health Car

Supporting collaboration with non-literate forest communities in the congo-basin

Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue for improvements in environmental governance and socialenvironmental justice. In this paper we show how we carried out a usability engineering effort in the “wild” context of the Congolese rainforest – designing, evaluating and iteratively improving novel collaborative data collection interfaces for non-literate forest communities that can subsequently be used to facilitate communication and information sharing with logging companies. Working in this context necessitates adopting a thoroughly flexible approach to the design, development, introduction and evaluation of technology and the modes of interaction it offers. We show that we have improved participant accuracy from about 75% towards 95% and provide a set of guidelines for designing and evaluating ICT solutions in “extreme circumstances” – which hold lessons for CSCW, HCI and ICT4D practitioners dealing with similar challenges