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

Please call ME.N.U.4EVER: Callback & Social Media Sharing in Rural Africa

In this paper we report findings generated during the early phase of a research project that aims to design and develop social media sharing systems to benefit marginalized communities. Studies of cell-phone network users in the developing world have shown that the relatively high tariffs for network access have resulted in new and innovate uses of technology to circumvent these costs. In this paper we describe a completely new form of service appropriation and how it is being used to overcome tariff costs in a remote rural area of South Africa. In this country, cell-phone providers offer a highly constrained form of free messaging to their subscribers called “callback”. These requests contain the caller’s cell-phone number and the recipient’s very short personalized message. Up to five free callback requests can be sent per day to any South African cell-phone network. This service is provided for emergencies when as pay-as-you-go customers do not have any airtime left. However, callback is used in rural areas in ways that go far beyond emergencies. As with SMS, the constraints on the callback have been appropriated by people to shape both a new language and cultural interactions. This paper reports the context of our study in communication practices in a remote rural area of South Africa, our methodology which we position within Ethnographic Action Research, and our findings and their implications for the design, development and deployment of social media sharing systems for this area

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

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

Beyond being a Proxy User: A look at NGOs’ Potential Role in ICT4D Deployment

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially those based at the community level, have been identified as pivotal tools in the field of social economic development. They are known to have structured frameworks through which they dispense their programs to achieve desired results. However, ICT4D practitioners (researchers and technologist) have relegated this resource to primary means of getting into the community for logistical purposes which might explain the high levels of failed and mismatched technological interventions. This paper argues that the relationship between NGOs and technologists can be extended further than the current view of a researcher’s dependence on an NGO as a ‘local champion’. Action Research is rapidly being adopted in ICT4D and is seen as a satisfactory means of enriching the research experience, which leads to tangible, sustainable results. Using the five stages of an Action Research project cycle as a framework, we demonstrate how NGOs and the community can take a pro-active and leading role in research and design of sustainable ICT4D interventions

A revolution in ICT, the last hope for African Rural Communities' technology appropriation

In this paper we present a methodological perspective on the challenge of designing products suited to rural practices and conceptualizations in Southern Africa. To create a framework compatible with rural customs of information transfer and supportive of rural priorities, we are sensitive to the way power relations between the rural and urban practises affect development and design methods. This paper argues within a theoretical perspective of Development Informatics on designing for the oral and performed knowledge that people routinely share, informally, and facetoface. Such knowledge inherently differs from those knowledge forms that Information communication Technology (ICT) explicates and codifies and is illserved by knowledge representation and retrieval mechanisms (e.g. hierarchical structures, textbased search, technical ontologies). Uncovering the incompatibility of existing technologies with the representation of African Indigenous Knowledge systems reveals our own conceptual limitations in finding new answers without falling back on familiar ICT patterns, be they technological or methodological. Adopting a dialogical and participatory action research approach to ICT design and development is core not only to preserving culture and identity locally but nourishing local invention of ICT more generally. Thus, our discussion explores how the processes and methods, through which we understand users and their activities, can shape design and development concepts and paradigms