Anita Lee Hong

Beyond ethnography: engagement and reciprocity as foundations for design research out here

This paper explores an emerging paradigm for HCI design research based primarily upon engagement, reciprocity and doing. Much HCI research begins with an investigatory and analytic ethnographic approach before translating to design. Design may come much later in the process and may never benefit the community that is researched. However in many settings it is difficult for researchers to access the privileged ethnographer position of observer and investigator. Moreover rapid ethnographic research often does not seem the best or most appropriate course of action. We draw upon a project working with a remote Australian Aboriginal community to illustrate an alternative approach in Indigenous research, where the notion of reciprocity is first and foremost. We argue that this can lead to sustainable designs, valid research and profound innovation.

Cross-Cultural Dialogical Probes

This paper explores the use of probes in a very remote Australian Aboriginal community where the rich traditional and post-colonial culture is worlds away from the urban Australian home of the research team. Cultural probes and technology probes have seen an enormous uptake in HCI as methods to develop inspiration from and insights into culture. Typically they are left behind, as unmanned probes, to collect and send data (or inspiring contributions) back to the design team. We investigate how probes align with indigenous ways of knowing, in particular a preference for situated knowledge creation, orality and co-presence. Through a case study we articulate how a technology probe became used as a means to engage in dialogue and co-creation with the local community. We found that co-presence of researchers and participants is crucial to foster engagement, unanticipated insights into culture and openings beyond the original problem-solution design framework. To highlight this, departing from the original conceptualization of probes, we propose and discuss the concept of manned cross-cultural dialogical probes.

Bi-Cultural Content Publication on a Digital Noticeboard: a Design and Cultural Differences Case Study

We present our observations of Aboriginal Australian practices around a custom digital noticeboard and compare our insights to related research on cultural differences, literacy and ICT4D. The digital noticeboard was created, upon a request by the community Elders, to foster communication across the community. The initial design, informed by discussions and consultations, aimed at supporting the local Aboriginal language and English, both in written and spoken form, at supporting the oral tradition, and at accommodating for different perceptions and representations of time. This paper presents observations about the first encounters with the digital noticeboard by those members of the community that took part in its conceptualization. Such observations reinforce existing knowledge on such cultural phenomena as collectivism and time perception, issues related to literacy, moderation and censorship. We contribute to framing such knowledge within a concrete case study and draw implication for design of tools for bi-cultural content publication.

Growing Existing Aboriginal Designs to Guide a Cross-Cultural Design Project

Designing across cultures requires considerable attention to inter-relational design methods that facilitate mutual exploration, learning and trust. Many Western design practices have been borne of a different model, utilizing approaches for the design team to rapidly gain insight into “users” in order to deliver concepts and prototypes, with little attention paid to different cultural understandings about being, knowledge, participation and life beyond the design project. This paper describes a project that intends to create and grow a sustainable set of technology assisted communication practices for the Warnindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt in the form of digital noticeboards. Rather than academic practices of workshops, interviews, probes or theoretical discourses that emphasize an outside-in perspective, we emphasize building upon the local designs and practices. Our team combines bilingual members from the local Land Council in collaboration with academics from a remote urban university two thousand kilometers away. We contribute an approach of growing existing local practices and materials digitally in order to explore viable, innovative and sustainable technical solutions from this perspective.

A Cross-Cultural Noticeboard for a Remote Community: Design, Deployment, and Evaluation

Remote communities all over the world often face the problem of creating and sharing digital contents in ways that are appropriate for their values and customs while using tools that were designed for Western contexts. This paper advocates for a different approach that builds upon the own goals and ambitions of a specific community, leveraging existing skills, and reflecting local ways of knowing in spite of the higher costs. We present the design of a digital noticeboard tailored to the needs and values of the Australian Aboriginal community of Groote Eylandt. The noticeboard was designed to support communication and promote literacy by offering bi-lingual multimodal content creation and sharing. The final design mirrors the preference for orality and storytelling, is well suited to working in groups, and pays special attention to issues of moderation. The noticeboard does not rely on a stable connectivity, and notices can be shared to many locations using low-tech opportunistic mechanisms. Because the value of custom designs can hardly be assessed only in terms of cost and efficiency in this paper we propose to focus on community engagement as a measure of success for HCI4D projects.

Policies on and practices of cultural inclusivity in learning management systems: Perspectives of Indigenous holistic pedagogies

ABSTRACT Online learning has become a conventional term and practice in Australian higher education, yet cultural inclusivity for Indigenous (Indigenous for the purposes of this paper refers to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) students is insufficiently reflected in learning management system (LMS) policies and design. This study aims to explore culturally inclusive learning entrenched in Australian university policies on and practices of LMS by applying Indigenous holistic pedagogical values in LMS design. Based on a literature review, we articulate four dimensions: communication, collaboration, community and interculturality for culturally inclusive learning in an online learning environment. By using the dimensions, we critically review policies (n = 10) and LMS sites (n = 50). In this review, we argue that there are contrasts of individually heterogeneous and collectively homogeneous approaches, self-focused and community-driven pedagogy, and task-oriented and relational learning. Significantly, the review results indicate that Indigenous holistic pedagogies have a metaphysical strength to be the ontological foundation for cultural inclusivity.

Designing For Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Time

We present ongoing work that seeks to understand cross-cultural perspectives of time, and reflect these temporalities in the participatory design of a cross-cultural Digital Community Noticeboard. Time is a socio-cultural phenomenon that is experienced differently across cultures. Time practices in non-Western cultures can operate in tension with common interfaces for clocks and calendars, whereas other perspectives of time are underrepresented in interactive system design. We conducted community interviews and design workshops to investigate such themes. Two key design principles arising are that 1) time is social and relational, and 2) time is implicit and flexible. We propose ways to incorporate these principles in interface design.

From Preserving to Performing Culture in the Digital Era

We offer a vision of digitising culture as supporting cultural processes in the digital era, with a particular focus on participatory design approaches. In doing so, we draw on our own experiences of designing a cross-cultural digital community noticeboard with a very remote Australian Aboriginal community. We review several existing local and international perspectives on digitising culture that consider culture as artefacts, knowledge, language, and values, noting a common emphasis on creating cultural repositories and digital representations. We then advocate for a complementary viewpoint that shifts the focus from cultural repositories to cultural performances, informed by postcolonial computing theory. Finally, we highlight a series of open design, methodological, and ethical questions that will guide ongoing participatory design work to ensure that every community can create digital tools to embed in their cultural performance in the everyday, in and on their own terms.