Toward Empowered Design

Pragmatic design requires no radical alterations to the existing technology ecology and has successfully provided many viable solutions. Given the skills limitations within the developing world, however, developers also need a new design focus that views the user as designer

A 'Human-in-the-Loop' Mobile Image Recognition Application for Rapid Scanning of Water Quality Test Results

This paper describes an interactive system for drinking water quality testing in small community supplies, particularly in the developing world. The system combines a lowcost field test (the Aquatest field kit), a mobile phone for data processing and communications, and a human operator who is able to react immediately to a test result. Once a water sample has been collected and incubated, the mobile phone camera is used to 'scan' the test and obtain the result, which is displayed to the user along with information about the health implications of the water quality. Initial prototypes, while not yet sufficiently robust for real-world use, demonstrate that the system is technically feasible. This opens up interesting possibilities for wider use of 'human-in-the-loop' sensor systems in environmental monitoring

The Use of Mobile Phones for Development in Africa: Top-Down-Meets-Bottom-Up Partnering

The African continent currently boasts the highest mobile telephony growth rates in the world, bringing new communications possibilities to millions of people. The potential for mobile phones to reach a large and growing base of users across the continent, and to be used for development-related purposes, is becoming widely recognized, evidenced by the growing number of development-oriented projects, applications, and programs that specifically make use of mobiles. Pent-up demand and limited resources have led to innovative usage and services being developed at the grassroots level. Yet much remains to be done by governments in order to support further growth of telecommunications markets and services, while the private sector, non-profits, and academics all have an important role to play in the development process as well. The phenomenon of top-down-meeting-bottom-up partnerships that are springing up across the continent offers the potential for cultivating the necessary feedback loops between various actors involved in the development process, in order to create relevant applications that meet real needs

Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa

We consider practices that sustain social and physical environments beyond those dominating sustainable HCI discourse. We describe links between walking, sociality, and using resources in a case study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Like 360 million rural Africans, inhabitants of these villages are poor and, like 25% and 92% of the world, respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We describe nine practices in using the charging stations we deployed. We recorded 700 people using the stations, over a year, some regularly. We suggest that the way we frame practices limits insights about them, and consider various routines in using and sharing local resources to discover relations that might also feature in charging. Specifically, walking interconnects routines in using, storing, sharing and sustaining resources, and contributes to knowing, feeling, wanting and avoiding as well as to different aspects of sociality, social order and perspectives on sustainability. Along the way, bodies acquire literacies that make certain relationalities legible. Our study shows we cannot assert what sustainable practice means a priori and, further, that detaching practices from bodies and their paths limits solutions, at least in rural Africa. Thus, we advocate a more “alongly” integrated approach to data about practices.Web of Scienc

Moving away from Erindi-roukambe: Transferability of a rural community-based co-design

It has become increasingly clear that situated design and contextualized research needs to undergo a validation phase to determine transferability. Within our longitudinal research project in rural Namibia, we have reached a maturity of methods and product. Yet little do we know about their validity beyond the limited context in the absence of cross-contextual verification. In Erindi-roukambe, the site of our community-based co-design, we have learned to understand and include local perspectives and structures within the dialogic of a participatory action research approach. By engaging with the community over a long period of time local research findings, as well as mutual knowledge have fostered and enriched design decisions. Recognizing that indigenous rural communities in the regional and globally face similar challenges with inappropriate mainstream technology we are currently investigating the applicability of our findings, processes and prototype in other contexts. We have introduced our approach at three other rural sites, two in Namibia and one in East Malaysia. The communities responded well to the technology demonstrating intuitive use and engagement. However, although we have gained promising results we wish to caution pre-mature conclusions on transferability without a more profound understanding of the depth of community engagement, transformation, contextual similarities, and cross-contextual validation

Designing with community health workers: feedback-integrated multimedia learning for rural community health

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are an integral part of the rural health system, and it is imperative that their voices are accommodated in digital health projects. In the mobile health education project discussed in this thesis (The Bophelo Haeso project), we sought to find ways to amplify CHWs' voices, enabling them to directly influence design and research processes as well as technological outcomes. The Bophelo Haeso (BH) project equips CHWs with health videos on their mobile phones to use for educating and counselling the rural public. We investigated how to best co-design, with CHWs, a feedback mechanism atop the basic BH health education model, thus enabling their voices in the design process and in the process of community education. This thesis chronicles this inclusive design and research process - a 30-month process that spanned three sub-studies: an 18-month process to co-design the feedback mechanism with CHWs, a 12-month deployment study of the feedback mechanism and, overlapping with the feedback deployment study, a 17-month study looking at the consumption patterns of the BH educational videos. This work contributes to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in three distinct ways. First, it contributes to the growing knowledge of co-design practice with participants of limited digital experience by introducing a concept we termed co-design readiness. We designed and deployed explorative artefacts and found that by giving CHWs increased technical, contextual, and linguistic capacity to contribute to the design process, they were empowered to unleash their innate creativity, which in turn led to more appropriate and highly-adopted solutions. Secondly, we demonstrate the efficacy of incorporating an effective village-to-clinic feedback mechanism in digital health education programs. We employed two approaches to feedback - asynchronous voice and roleplaying techniques. Both approaches illustrate the combined benefits of implementing creative methods for effective human-to-technology and human-tohuman communication in ways that enable new forms of expression. Finally, based on our longitudinal study of video consumption, we provide empirical evidence of offline video consumption trends in health education settings. We present qualitative and quantitative analyses of video-use patterns as influenced by the CHWs' ways of being and working. Through these analyses, we describe CHWs and their work practices in depth. In addition to the three main contributions, this thesis concludes with critical reflections from the lessons and experiences of the 30-month study. We discuss the introduction of smartphones in rural villages, especially among elderly, low-literate, and non-English-speaking users, and present guidelines for designing relevant and usable smartphones for these populations. The author also reflects on her position as an African-born qualitative researcher in Africa, and how her positionality affected the outcomes of this research

Design On The Go: How African American youth use mobiletechnologies for digital content creation

The use of mobile technologies has been proposed forincreasing access and designing innovative educationalactivities. Unfortunately, there is limited data on the currentuses of cellular phones amongst low-income AfricanAmerican youth. In particular, there is little known abouthow this population may design on the rapidly adaptingtechnology, what digital content they create and share viamobile technology. In this exploratory study, I surveyed 103 youths, ages 13-21, and asked about their ownership of cellular phonesand their patterns of use with media, the Internet, as wellas whether they create digital content. The findingsindicate that although these young people use manyforms of technology and media, they are more prone tocreating content such as photographs and share theirwriting through cellular phones than through the Internet.The results of this study may indicate trends in use andthe opportunity to develop and support digital design andcontent on mobile platforms

Making the Link – providing mobile media for novice communities in the developing world

In this paper we investigate the media needs of low-income mobile users in a South African township. We develop and deploy a system that allows users to download media at no costs to themselves, in order to probe future media requirements for similar user groups. We discover that, not only are the community interested in developmental information, but are just as interested in sharing local music or videos. Furthermore, the community consume the media in ways that we did not expect which had direct impacts on their lives. Finally, we conclude with some reflections on the value of media and the most appropriate ways to deliver it in developing world communities

Designing with Community Health Workers: Enabling Productive Participation Through Exploration

In this paper, we present the results of an 18-month engagement with community health workers (CHWs) in Lesotho, through which we designed a feedback-integrated platform for community health education using mobile multimedia. We initiated a co-design process using participatory action research to empower CHWs to use their own knowledge and experiences to define our shared design and research agenda. We present our process and its outcomes, noting the importance of engaging with CHWs using techniques considerate of their literacy and experience, and the necessity of separating the concept from the artefact in the process of co-design. Further, we demonstrate how deep engagement and multiple participatory action research cycles give CHWs time to develop confidence and experience around the use of technology in their work. We argue that when CHWs are empowered to contribute their creativity and local experiences in this manner, the outcome is technology that is best suited for their unique context of work, in ways that would not be achieved using conventional approaches to co-design. Finally, we present early outcomes of the co-design efforts, articulating design requirements for a feedback mechanism for CHWs