Bridging the Digital Divide through Facebook Friendships: A Cross-Cultural Study

Over 80% of Facebook’s 1 billion [2] users are located outside of the US and Canada, but little is understood of how Facebook is used or impacts the lives of users, especially in collectivistic cultures. We address this question by conducting a comparative study of Facebook users from a collectivist culture, Namibia, and an individualistic culture, the United States. Although our study is continuing, we have identified several areas of difference that illustrate why and how culture influences users’ appropriation of this social network. Specifically, in this paper we examine differences in how friendships are made, maintained, and power relations assigned and discuss the importance of these differences in relation to the cultural context

Elements for Developing a Value-Added Digital Services Model for Rural Entrepreneurs in Namibia: An Exploratory Study

Supporting digitally enabled entrepreneurship in rural areas requires a holistic approach to ensure rural entrepreneurs take advantage of digital services finding innovative solutions that allow businesses to thrive in competitive markets. In the absence of a model for value-added digital services for rural entrepreneurs, it is uncertain what type of digital services should be offered for rural entrepreneurs once the challenges of connectivity, electricity and digital skills have been addressed and whether those digital rural services are responsive to rural communities\u27 needs and aspirations. The purpose of this study was to explore elements to be considered when developing a Valued Added Digital Services Model for Rural Entrepreneurs in Namibia. The study applied a cross-sectional survey using a mixed-method to collect data from 134 respondents comprising 14 rural entrepreneurs and 63 members from four rural communities and 57 ICT sector key informants. The results elucidated that, Digital Infrastructure, Digital Skills, Digital Inclusion, Digital Services and Digital Actors are the five key elements for the model. The study proposed a conceptual model that facilitates the understanding and underscore the effectiveness of an ecosystem approach that is embedded in drivers and pillars of a thriving entrepreneur and proposes interventions to mitigate the barriers for effective adoption of digital services by rural entrepreneurs

Including critical Approaches in HCI Curricula::A provocation

This is not a paper [1]; it is more of a collection and reflection of tangled ideas and discussions on the politics of engaging multiple worlds in design. Discussions brought on by three African HCI researchers on their journey to define an identity for an African HCI curriculum. We invite the readership to engage with our stories and ponder with us these questions: 1) How might we help future designers engage and navigate multiple worldviews, some of which are less dominant? 2) How might we help them navigate uncontested politics and ethics of design encounters? 3) What are the challenges that we educators might face as we introduce critical approaches in the classroom

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone

Challenges and paradoxes in decolonising HCI: A critical discussion

The preponderance of Western methods, practices, standards, and classifications in the manner in which new technology-related knowledge is created and globalised has led to calls for more inclusive approaches to design. A decolonisation project is concerned with how researchers might contribute to dismantling and re-envisioning existing power relations, resisting past biases, and balancing Western heavy influences in technology design by foregrounding the authentic voices of the indigenous people in the entire design process. We examine how the establishment of local Global South HCI communities (AfriCHI and ArabHCI) has led to the enactment of decolonisation practices. Specifically, we seek to uncover how decolonisation is perceived in the AfriCHI and ArabHCI communities as well as the extent to which both communities are engaged with the idea of decolonisation without necessarily using the term. We drew from the relevant literature, our own outsider/insider lived experiences, and the communities’ responses to an online anonymised survey to highlight three problematic but interrelated practical paradoxes: a terminology, an ethical, and a micro-colonisation paradox. We argue that these paradoxes expose the dilemmas faced by local non-Western researchers as they pursue decolonisation thinking. This article offers a blended perspective on the decolonisation debate in HCI, CSCW, and the practice-based CSCW scholarly communities and invites researchers to examine their research work using a decolonisation lens

Perspectives on gender and product design

International audienceInteractive technologies have a profound mediating effect on the way we obtain and contribute to knowledge, relate to each other and contribute to society. Often, "gender" is not a factor that is explicitly considered in the design of these technologies. When gender is considered, products are often designed with idealised models of gendered "users" -- designed for men, designed for women, designed for boys, designed for girls, or designed for the "average user" who could be male or female. However, the ways in which gender-bias or gender-neutrality are constructed in the design process and the resulting effect on the interactive artifacts that are produced is not well understood. This workshop will address what HCI is currently bringing, and can bring, to the table in addressing this issue