Black skins white masks by Franz Fanon

"A feeling of inferiority?" asks Frantz Fanon, in his essay "The Fact of Blackness." "No," he says, "a feeling of nonexistence." Recently, South African students protesting for #Rhodes Must Fall joined a succession of liberation movements referencing Fanon over the past 50 years. Among many creative acts, students wore placards that read "recognize me." Mainstream media reported protests at formerly exclusively white universities most extensively; they also tended to portray protesting students at majority black universities as prone to violence—woeful evidence of Fanon's contemporary significance to race identity politics in education. His relevance to HCI, specifically, is simply illustrated by image searches using Google.com.na. Only two of the first 50 people in photos returned for "person using computer" are black unless the special filter category "black" is used. There is no filter for "white," but there are categories for "work," "office," "icon," and so on. Indeed, the black man is an "object in the midst of other objects," "black in relation to the white man," Fanon writes, and "has no ontological resistance." (Searches for "person with computer" using one of the languages in the country where I live, "nakulongifa okomputa," do not yet yield any image results.)http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=J373hb2016Informatic

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Efforts to design voice-based, social media platforms for low-literacy communities in developing countries have not widened access to information in the ways intended. This article links this to who describes the relations that constitute personhood and how these relations are expressed in designing and deploying systems. I make these links oriented by critique in human–computer interaction that design continues a history of colonialism and embeds meanings in media that disrupt existing communication practices. I explore how we translated ‘logics’ about sociality through logics located outside of the rural South African community that we targeted for design and deployment. The system aimed to enable inhabitants to record, store and share voice files using a portable, communally owned display. I describe how we engaged with inhabitants, to understand needs, and represented and abstracted from encounters to articulate requirements, which we translated into statements about technology. Use of the system was not as predicted. My analysis suggests that certain writing cultures, embedded in translations, reify knowledge, disembody voices and neglect the rhythms of life. This biases social media towards individualist logics and limits affordances for forms, genres and other elements of communication that contribute to sociality. Thus, I propose oral practices offer oppositional power in designing digital bubbles to support human togetherness and that we can enrich design by moving the centre—a phrase taken from Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o (Moving the centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms, James Currey, London, 1993) who insists that liberation from colonialism requires plural sites of creativity. To realize this potential, we need radically different approaches that enable symmetrical translation.CSIR-Meraka, South Africa and partially by EPSRC Grant (EP/H042857/1).http://link.springer.com/journal/1462017-02-27hb201

Spatio-temporal properties of motion detectors matched to low image velocities in hovering insects

AbstractOur recent study [O'Carroll et al. (1996). Nature 382, 63–66) described a correlation between the spatio-temporal properties of motion detecting neurons in the optic lobes of flying insects and behaviour. We consider here theoretical properties of insect motion detectors at very low image velocities and measure spatial and temporal sensitivity of neurons in the lobula complex of two specialised hovering insects, the bee-fly Bombylius and the hummingbird hawkmoth, Macroglossum. The spatio-temporal optima of direction-selective neurons in these insects lie at lower velocities than those of other insects which we have studied, including large syrphid flies, which are also excellent hoverers. We argue that spatio-temporal optima reflect a compromise between the demands of diverse behaviour, which can involve prolonged periods of stationary, hovering flight followed by spectacular high speed pursuits of conspecifics. Males of the syrphid Eristalis which engage in such behaviour, have higher temporal frequency optima than females. High contrast sensitivity in these flies nevertheless results in reliable responses at very low image velocities. Neurons of Bombylius have two distinct velocity optima, suggesting that they sum inputs from two classes of motion correlator with different time constants. This also provides sensitivity to a large range of velocities

Toward an Afro-Centric indigenous HCI paradigm

Current HCI paradigms are deeply rooted in a western epistemology which attests its partiality and bias of its embedded assumptions, values, definitions, techniques and derived frameworks and models.Thus tensions created between local cultures and HCI principles require us to pursue a more critical research agenda within an indigenous epistemology. In this paper we present an Afro-centric paradigm, as promoted by African scholars, as an alternative perspective to guide interaction design in a situated context in Africa and promote the reframing of HCI. We illustrate a practical realization of this paradigm shift within our own community driven designin Southern Africa.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hihc20hb2016Informatic

Peer-to-peer in the workplace : a view from the road

This paper contributes to the growing literature on peer-topeer (P2P) applications through an ethnographic study of auto-rickshaw drivers in Bengaluru, India. We describe how the adoption of a P2P application, Ola, which connects passengers to rickshaws, changes drivers work practices. Ola is part of the ‘peer services’ phenomenon which enable new types of ad-hoc trade in labour, skills and goods. Autorickshaw drivers present an interesting case because prior to Ola few had used Smartphones or the Internet. Furthermore, as financially vulnerable workers in the informal sector, concerns about driver welfare become prominent. Whilst technologies may promise to improve livelihoods, they do not necessarily deliver [57]. We describe how Ola does little to change the uncertainty which characterizes an auto drivers’ day. This leads us to consider how a more equitable and inclusive system might be designed.http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858393&CFID=853645300&CFTOKEN=16898376hb2016Informatic

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.This research was supported by CSIR-Meraka, South Africa and, partly, by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant (EP/H042857/1).http://dl.acm.org/hb201

Possible functions of a population of descending neurons in the honeybee's visuo-motor pathway

An identified population of honeybee descending neurons (DNs) responds to wide-field motion over the compound eyes. They give non-habituating, directionally selective responses which adapt to continued motion. Contrast sensitivity functions show the responses depend on luminance, contrast, spatial and temporal frequency. The distribution of the DNs' outputs in the thoracic ganglia is consistent with changes in muscular activity required for particular compensatory movements. These features suggest the DNs lie along the optomotor pathway. The DNs' responses have different time-courses. This might reflect distinctions in their putative inputs and between pathways implicated in different aspects of visually mediated flight control. The responses of horizontal DNs to contraction and expansion and to unidirectional motion were compared revealing differences in the way they integrate the monocular components of binocular flow-fields and how velocity and spatial structure effects this integration. It is possible the DNs are convergence site(s) for substrates underlying different behaviours each triggered by specific optical flow templates

Reflections on the NatureCHI workshop series : unobtrusive user experiences with technology in nature

Being in nature is often regarded to be calming, relaxing and purifying. While technology has the potential to support engagement with nature, developing systems that provide support in an unobtrusive manner holds many challenges for interaction design. In this article, the articles describe their reflections around the NatureCHI workshop series. The aim with the workshops has been to help foster a research community interested in the design of Unobtrusive User Experiences with Technology in Nature. The first of two workshops ran as part of CHI 2016 in San Jose, California, while the second workshop took place alongside MobileHCI 2017 in Vienna, Austria. With 25 papers presented in total, the workshops demonstrate a rising interest in the areas where nature and interactive technologies meet.https://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-mobile-human-computer/1126am2018Informatic