Designing Digital Storytelling for Rural African Communities

Chongilala – a long time ago – says Mama Rhoda of Adiedo, Kenya. She looks deeply into our eyes. We record her rhythms and rhymes as she sings and tells a story about her grandparents. She shows us the exact spot where her great-grandfathers and his friends used to sit and drink and how her grandmother used to dance. This thesis situates digital storytelling in rural African communities to enable rural people, like Mama Rhoda, to record and share their stories and to express their imaginations digitally. We explore the role of design, and the methods and perspectives designers need to take on to design across cultures and to understand the forms and meanings behind rural African interpretations of digital storytelling. These perspectives allow us to 'unconceal' how our Western storytelling traditions have influenced design methods and obscure the voices of ‘other’ cultures. By integrating ethnographic insights with previous experiences of designing mobile digital storytelling systems, we implement a method using cell-phones to localize storytelling and involve rural users in de- sign activities – probing ways to incorporate visual and audio media in storytelling. Products from this method help us to generate design ideas for our system, most notably flexibility. Leveraging this prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we report on situated use of our prototype and discuss, and relate to usage, the insights we gathered on our prototype, the users, their needs, and their context. We use these insights to uncover further implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities and reflect on the importance of spending time in-situ when designing across cultures. Deploying our prototype through an NGO, we stage first encounters with digital storytelling and show how key insiders can introduce the system to a wider community and make it accessible through their technical and social expertise. Our mobile digital storytelling system proved to be both useable and useful and its flexibility allowed users to form their own interpretations of digital storytelling and (re)appropriate our system to alternative ends. Results indicate that our system accommodates context and that storytelling activities around our system reflect identity. Our activities in communities across Africa also show that our system can be used as a digital voice that speaks to us, by allowing users to express themselves – through digital stories – in design

Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Mobile

Technology has changed the way in which people tell their stories. This paper introduces digital storytelling and looks at why the mobile is an ideal platform for creating digital stories. The iterative design approach chosen for our Mobile Digital Storytelling system is discussed. Results of a final experiment, comparing our system to an existing mobile system that supports digital storytelling, are presented, which suggest that our system has met its design goals of providing an effective and efficient user interface. Qualitative insights from user evaluations show that mobile digital storytelling has a future

Designing and theorizing co-located interactions.

This paper gives an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work we undertook in pursuit of designing co- located interactions. We show how we sensitized ourselves to theory from diverse intellectual disciplines, to develop an analytical lens to better think about co-located interactions. By critiquing current systems and their conceptual founda- tions, and further interrelating theories particularly in regard to performative aspects of identity and communication, we develop a more nuanced way of thinking about co-located interactions. Drawing on our sensitivities, we show how we generated and are exploring, through the process of design, a set of co-located interactions that are situated within our social ecologies, and contend that our upfront theoretical work enabled us to identify and explore this space in the first place. This highlights the importance of problem fram- ing, especially for projects adopting design methodologies

Situating digital storytelling within African communities

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging our prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, we distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a different community

Field Testing Mobile Digital Storytelling Software in Rural Kenya

We describe and reflect on a method we used to evaluate usability and give insights on situated use of a mobile digital storytelling prototype. We report on rich data we gained by implementing this method and argue that we were able to learn more about our prototype, users, their needs, and their context, than we would have through other evaluation methods. We look at the usability problems we uncovered and discuss how our flexibility in field- testing allowed us to observe unanticipated usage, from which we were able to motivate future design directions. Finally, we reflect on the importance of spending time in-situ during all stages of design, especially when designing across cultures

Situating digital storytelling within African communities

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging our prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, we distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a different community

Designing with Mobile Digital Storytelling in Rural Africa

We reflect on activities to design a mobile application to enable rural people in South Africa’s Eastern Cape to record and share their stories, which have implications for ‘cross-cultural design,’ and the wider use of stories in design. We based our initial concept for generating stories with audio and photos on cell-phones on a scenario informed by abstracting from digital storytelling projects globally and our personal experience. But insights from ethnography, and technology experiments involving storytelling, in a rural village led us to query our grounding assumptions and usability criteria. So, we implemented a method using cell-phones to localise storytelling, involve rural users and probe ways to incorporate visual and audio media. Products from this method helped us to generate design ideas for our current prototype which offers great flexibility. Thus we present a new way to depict stories digitally and a process for improving such software

Digital Storytelling in Africa

In this paper we examine how digital technology can be used to inspire, record and present oral stories in an African context. In particular we explore how to create technologies that are sympathetic to the cultures of the storytellers, both in the capture of stories and their retelling. Specifically, we look at: inspiring stories in District Six in Cape Town; capturing digital stories from users with low literacy levels and using virtual reality to retell indigenous and personal experience narratives

Digital Storytelling in Africa

In this paper we examine how digital technology can be used to inspire, record and present oral stories in an African context. In particular we explore how to create technologies that are sympathetic to the cultures of the storytellers, both in the capture of stories and their retelling. Specifically, we look at: inspiring stories in District Six in Cape Town; capturing digital stories from users with low literacy levels and using virtual reality to retell indigenous and personal experience narratives