6 research outputs found
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 violenceâwoeful 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 humanâcomputer interaction
that design continues a history of colonialism and
embeds meanings in media that disrupt existing communication
practices. I explore how we translated âlogicsâ
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
centreâa phrase taken from NguËgÄ±Ë wa Thiongâo (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
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
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 Africaâs 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 âalonglyâ 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
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 âpeer servicesâ 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
driversâ 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
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