Merging experiences and perspectives in the complexity of cross-cultural design

While our cross-cultural IT research continuously strives to contribute towards the development of HCI appropriate cross-cultural models and best practices, we are aware of the specificity of each development context and the influence of each participant. Uncovering the complexity within our current project as an international team with experiences from three different continents reveals a set of challenges and opportunities for growing global design communities

How was it for you? Experiences of participatory design in the UK health service

Improving co-design methods implies that we need to understand those methods, paying attention to not only the effect of method choices on design outcomes, but also how methods affect the people involved in co-design. In this article, we explore participants' experiences from a year-long participatory health service design project to develop ‘Better Outpatient Services for Older People’. The project followed a defined method called experience-based design (EBD), which represented the state of the art in participatory service design within the UK National Health Service. A sample of participants in the project took part in semi-structured interviews reflecting on their involvement in and their feelings about the project. Our findings suggest that the EBD method that we employed was successful in establishing positive working relationships among the different groups of stakeholders (staff, patients, carers, advocates and design researchers), although conflicts remained throughout the project. Participants' experiences highlighted issues of wider relevance in such participatory design: cost versus benefit, sense of project momentum, locus of control, and assumptions about how change takes place in a complex environment. We propose tactics for dealing with these issues that inform the future development of techniques in user-centred healthcare design

Learning HCI Across Institutions, Disciplines and Countries: A Field Study of Cognitive Styles in Analytical and Creative Tasks

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is increasingly becoming a subject taught in universities around the world. However, little is known of the interactions of the HCI curriculum with students in different types of institutions and disciplines internationally. In order to explore these interactions, we studied the performance of HCI students in design, technology and business faculties in universities in UK, India, Namibia, Mexico and China who participated in a common set of design and evaluation tasks. We obtained participants’ cognitive style profiles based on Allinson and Hayes scale in order to gain further insights into their learning styles and explore any relation between these and performance. We found participants’ cognitive style preferences to be predominantly in the adaptive range, i.e. with combined analytical and intuitive traits, compared to normative data for software engineering, psychology and design professionals. We further identified significant relations between students’ cognitive styles and performance in analytical and creative tasks of a HCI professional individual. We discuss the findings in the context of the distinct backgrounds of the students and universities that participated in this study and the value of research that explores and promotes diversity in HCI education

Deriving engagement protocols within community-based co-design projects in Namibia

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is used by community members for survival in the rural context and to sustain their way of living. The procedures on how community members share their knowledge amongst themselves and with others are unique. Cultural practices communication protocols differ from mainstream research and technology development procedures. Thus appropriate community engagement is instrumental towards the success of technology co-design with communities. Co-design endeavors should be framed in consistent and harmonized partnerships between community members and researchers for mutual learning and benefit. However, this has not been formulated as an objective of many ICT endeavors with communities in the past. With a raising number of interaction challenges reported we are reviewing our own community design experiences and promoting the development of an engagement protocol

Ensuring Participatory Design Through Free, Prior and Informed Consent: A Tale of Indigenous Knowledge Management System

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for Development is a growing field of study. There has also been an increasing interest in how access to ICT, such as connecting to the Internet, might impact social and economic development by, for example, giving access to unlimited knowledge (e.g. e-learning), providing health-related services (telediagnosis), offering businesses opportunities (e-commerce), employment opportunities, and access to government services (e-Government websites) (Siew, Yeo, & Zaman, 2013). In all such development projects, two critical success factors are the degree of the users’ satisfaction of the technology and the degree to which the services offered by the technology address the primary needs of intended beneficiaries (Dearden, 2008)

Considerations for Co-Designing e-Government Services in Under-Served Rural Communities

Electronic government (e-Government) is expected to play a critical role of enabling the attainment of best practices of governance. Despite various efforts to implement e-Government, its use by the populace remains low. There are claims that e-government promotes social exclusion of those in under-served rural communities on technical, language, costs and culture grounds. As such, this study assumes a co-designing and co-creation approach in an attempt to incorporate different contextual factors resulting from cultural surroundings, capacities and skills among rural population. The aim is to promote electronic participation by rural based citizens and attain social inclusivity. Users based in under-served rural communities shall be engaged in identifying characteristics of e-Government and issues with rural ICT. The study makes use of solar powered technology (mobile phone and internet access) provided by the “Fusion Grid” project. Selected e-Government services are used to experiment the process of co-designing and co-creation of e-Government.Peer reviewe

Community consensus: Design beyond participation

Introduction in lieu of Abstract: "Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu" Zulu proverb, translated "A person is a person through other persons" Dilemmas in Participation The importance of user involvement in design activities has been widely recognized in efforts to design more usable and acceptable systems. Tools and methods used in some approaches, such as user-centered, interaction, and Participatory Design, shifted the focus to the user; nevertheless, "user involvement" remains a vague concept and a highly varied practice. Value-based approaches have heightened awareness of the need to explicitly redefine who is making the design decisions and to explicate what design processes say about users. However, to date, design discourse has merely scratched the surface in unpacking meanings about participation and the ways these meanings affect design outcomes. We rarely discuss the assumptions inherent in concepts related to being human, whether as an individual or a community member (i.e., participating with others within a community), nor do we articulate how participation and design activities together define the identity of the user/community member as "the designer from within" and "the technologist/researcher/designer" as the "designer from outside" not originating from the community in which the design takes place. In this article, we propose that grappling with meanings about participation is critical to design, and in particular, to cross-cultural design. Societies and groups based on other value systems conceptualize "participation" differently, and this understanding directly affects the intercultural design process. Thus, we explore the concept of participation in design from a different viewpoint. We draw on an African philosophy of humanness---"Ubuntu," as lived through African rural community practices---to re-frame Participatory Design paradigms and methods. We reflect on our own Participatory Design interventions in Southern African communities as we explore the theoretical grounds to draw methodological conclusions for design. We then propose guidelines that might enable technologists/researchers to respond more effectively in developing contextually appropriate and consensual methods in design with communities