Does he take Sugar? Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of Compassion

For 20 years, up until the late 1990s, the U.K.'s Radio 4 ran a weekly series called "Does He Take Sugar?" that presented an in-depth treatment of disability. The title of the program refers to when someone asks the carer about sugar instead of directly asking the person who is being offered a hot drink. It captures the sentiment of talking about someone who is disabled in the third person, while in their presence, regardless of whether that person can speak for him- or herself. The program brought attention to this kind of "overlooking" and gave disabled people a voice (it also had a disabled presenter). It did wonders for helping "abled" people realize how to listen, talk to, and engage with disabled people just like anyone else. Likewise, HCI has come from a place where our attempts to help others who are "worse off than us" have often ended up being framed in a similar third-person vein. The tendency has been to develop technological solutions for them based on our understanding of what they need, by providing for a lack of something. This could be technical (e.g., access to the Internet, computers, mobile airtime), a declining ability that comes with age (e.g., sight, looking after oneself, memory), or a physical or mental disability (e.g., autism, depression). While many projects have sensitively and successfully demonstrated how novel technologies can support and enhance people's lives (e.g., [1]), some are fronted with a third-person perspective, asking questions such as, "What technology do they need?" And, mostly, we have designed solutions to compensate and overcome rather than to innovate. Although the wider field of HCI has moved forward in its thinking, with a focus now on ethnographic methods and co-design, here we explicate our growing unease with the rhetoric of compassion that underlies much of our wanting to help people. So although HCI may be more attuned to working with people, there still remains a remnant of "sugar thinking" that we will explore in two areas of research—assisted living and information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D)—to illustrate our concerns. As an alternative to focusing on need, we outline an approach that promotes empowerment through technology, enabling other people to become better equipped to the point where they can innovate for themselves. To achieve this, we propose framing HCI research that embraces a rhetoric of engagement. By this we mean talking about, demonstrating, and eventually handing over to people our toolkits, know-how, and technologies so they can decide what to do with them in their own contexts. The people we engage with can be those living in poverty, without access to the Internet, the elderly, the disabled, and so on—but also those whose professional role is to teach, care for, and work with them. In so doing, we see our role as HCI researchers to remain as researchers, and to put our efforts into what we are best at and feel comfortable with—that is, being inventors, imagineers, and purveyors of new interaction design tools, interfaces, and technologies. We leave the appropriation and adapting of those technologies to the people whose lives they might enhance. We empower them to engage with us, not just in design, but in co-creation and clear articulation of their technology desires

Interfaces to Mobile Virtual Reality

In this paper, we describe a project which uses PDAs to provide an interactive experience with a virtual environment. In particular, we focus on the navigational aspects of allowing the users to move through, and view, the environment. As this system will be deployed in a museum, it was crucial that the navigation be as intuitive as possible. To that end, we developed and evaluated two prototypes: one was based purely on gesture, whilst the other used a combination of gesture and keypad. For the purposes of our application, the combination of keypad and gesture provided the most effective

Interactive Personal Storytelling An Ethnographic Study and Simulation of Apartheid-Era Narratives

This paper reports on a digital storytelling project which seeks to create interactive storytelling of personal experience narratives. We begin with an ethnographic study of two resident storytellers at the District Six Museum, Cape Town, Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers, who tell audience their personal Apartheid-era narratives. An analysis of their narratives and audience interactions led to the design a digital storytelling prototype in the form of a virtual environment containing two storyteller agents based on Joe and Noor. These agents simulated two interactions: questions in which users could ask the storyteller agents questions; and exchange structures where storyteller agents ask users questions. We evaluated the effectiveness of these in a controlled experiment (n = 101) and found that questions led to significant increases in narrative engagement (p=0.05) and interest (p=0.02) while exchange structures significantly improved narrative enjoyment (p=0.004), engagement (p=0.002) and interest (p=0.02)

Using paper prototyping as a rapid participatory design technique in the design of MLCAT - a lecture podcasting tool

Podcasting has permeated the developed world higher education environments. Despite this, there is inadequate research published to explore podcasting in developing Higher Education Institutions. In areas with limited electricity, never mind the internet, how can podcasting succeed? This paper describes Participatory Design activities with university lecturers in sub-Saharan Africa (University of Cape Town and Makerere University) to design a podcasting tool. We postulate that by involving them in the design, we can identify specific requirements and they will accept and use the tool. Academics have heavy workloads and tight schedules and conducting design sessions with busy professionals demands preparation, improvisation, and clarity of purpose. Therefore, this paper presents the use of paper prototyping technique during the two hour Participatory Design sessions with lecturers in the design of a horizontal MLCAT prototype. In addition, we present formative evaluations that reveal insightful results which will be used in the further implementation of the tool

Health Education in Rural Communities with Locally Produced and Locally Relevant Multimedia Content

Health education in rural communities is one of the main ways in which developing countries are addressing prevalent health issues like maternal and child mortality, HIV/Aids, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. In many rural villages, Community Health Workers (CHWs) act as proxies through which health education information is spread in their communities. In this paper, we discuss important principles to consider when designing solutions for creating and distributing digital health content in rural communities, based on previous work in the area of health education and the training of CHWs. We then introduce our model of content creation and distribution, which involves providing tools that allow rural health professionals to independently create health content from within their local communities. We also present the lessons learned from our deployment of this model in Lesotho - highlighting the opportunities presented by the use of locally produced hence locally relevant digital content in health education

Holistic Programming Environments

As a result of the popularity of graphical user interfaces, it is now almost impossible to buy a programming language compiler – instead, one purchases a development environment. Of course, we can scoff at the distinction and say that a development environment is nothing more than a programming language with visual (as opposed to syntactic) sugar. We believe, however, that this view must change if safer and more responsible programming languages are to be created for the next generation of programmer. This paper reports our motivation for wishing to integrate language and environment and makes suggestions as to how this may be achieved

Image Recognition Techniques for in a Mobile Public Interactive Display

This paper describes a system which runs on a mobile phone that allows for the distribution of media packages to users with Bluetooth enabled camera phones. Users take photographss of specially designed posters and send them, using Bluetooth, to the system. An algorithm that enables the system to recognize the user images is developed, evaluated and modified using two rounds of user experiments. The final algorithm is found to correctly recognize the image photographed 87% of the time

A Streamlined Mobile User-Interface for Improved Access to LMS Services

Abstract— Universities in developing countries face greater challenges in implementing Learning Management Systems (LMSs) due to resource-poor settings, characterized by: low levels of ICT infrastructure; electricity outages; few computers; and limited and expensive Internet bandwidth, among other constraints. It is anticipated that if mobile phones are carefully integrated into the ecologies of LMSs, the impact of some of the above challenges in implementing LMSs would be reduced. This paper presents a user-centered design process of mobile LMS interfaces for accessing selected LMS services on mobile phones, and a user experience evaluation for a mobile LMS application implementation. From the design and implementation processes of the mLMS (mobile LMS), and the user experience evaluation of a working mLMS prototype, we conclude that: the ideas presented in the mLMS are technically feasible; the application is useful to the students and the students are encouraged to use their mobile phones to access LMS services more often, thereby reducing the over-reliance and pressure on the constrained institutional ICT resources

Learning Management Systems: Understanding the Expectations of Learners in Developing Countries

The main objective of this study was to identify strategies of enabling learners in developing countries to fully exploit the potential of learning management systems (LMSs). The study set out to: (i) identify the services of learning management systems that are most needed and desired by university learners in developing countries, and (ii) to identify appropriate access strategies that would guide design decisions on how to effectively and satisfactorily deliver such services to the university students in developing countries. A total of 144 students from two African universities participated in the study by responding to an online survey questionnaire. The questionnaire asked students; how often they accessed LMSs to obtain, create and exchange information and knowledge; their preference for the different devices used for accessing the LMS; the LMS services they are most often required to access; and the services they most desire to use. The findings of the survey indicate that the most desired and most accessed LMS services by the students include assignments, announcements, resources, course outlines and the chat room. At the same time, mobile phones are rated the least used devices for accessing the LMS services

Designing Mobile LMS Interfaces: Learners’ Expectations and Experiences

Purpose – This paper aims to present findings of a study that was carried out to identify strategies of enabling learners in developing countries to fully exploit the potential of learning management systems (LMSs). The study set out to: identify the services of learning management systems that are most needed and desired by university learners in developing countries; and identify appropriate access strategies that would guide design decisions on how to effectively and satisfactorily deliver such services to the university students in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 144 students from two African universities participated in the study by responding to an online survey questionnaire. The questionnaire asked students: how often they accessed LMSs to obtain, create and exchange information and knowledge; their preference for the different devices used for accessing the LMS; the LMS services they are most often required to access; and the services they most desire to use. Findings – The findings of the survey indicate that the most desired and most accessed LMS services by the students include: assignments, announcements, resources, course outlines and the chat room. At the same time, mobile phones are rated the least used devices for accessing the LMS services, mainly due to inadequate design of LMSs for mobile interaction. Originality/value – The paper also presents mobile LMS interface designs and ideas achieved through a participatory design process for enhancing the accessibility of the most needed and desired LMS services on mobile phones