Heike Winschiers-Theophilus

Being participated: a community approach

In this paper, we explore the concept of participatory design from a different viewpoint by drawing on an African philosophy of humanness -Ubuntu-, and African rural community practices. The situational dynamics of participatory interaction become obvious throughout the design experiences within our community project. Supported by a theoretical framework we reflect upon current participatory design practices. We intend to inspire and refine participatory design concepts and methods beyond the particular context of our own experiences.

Cultural influences on Facebook practices

Facebook usage influences and are influenced by cultural practices.In tightly-knit societies such as Namibia, we show that online behavior is more open and transparent.Users in the United States are changing their online behavior to include greater self-censorship.Employer activities on Facebook is driving user behavioral changes in the United States.Facebook is the preferred social media site in both the United States and Namibia. Facebook has been adopted in many countries with over 80% of its user-base being outside of the US and Canada. Yet, despite this global dominance, not much is understood of Facebook usage by individuals in non-western cultures. A cross-cultural study was conducted with undergraduate students in the United States and Namibia to examine Facebook use. The study used a mixed method of online surveys and focus groups in both countries. The research examined issues such as motivations for use, friendships, privacy and trust, and life changing events such as relationships, births, deaths, religion and politics. Findings suggest cultural influence on both online and offline practices as well as appropriation and re-contextualization to fit existing offline cultural practices. While we find that participants from the United States are changing their online behavior toward increased self-censorship, more users from Namibia, where family and community structures are important, continue to engage in online behavior that is more open and transparent. Findings also suggest an expressive privacy paradox for United States participants, who are generally less concerned with updating their privacy settings while simultaneously practicing self-censorship.

Situated interactions between audiovisual media and African herbal lore

We describe a rural African community’s interactions in recording and interpreting video on herb lore in our endeavours to design digital systems that extend sharing knowledge in a system of traditional medicine (TM). Designing for such a system involves reflecting on own narratives about medicine and media and recognising that narratives reflect “cultural logics” and media transforms narratives. We used video as sites to explore meaning-making in herb lore; anchor our dialogic with, and about users; and, elicit design ideas. Participants’ prioritise speech, gesture and bodily interaction, above other visual context. Further, recordings can embody nuances in social relations and depict temporal patterns that are integral to TM pedagogy. However, such embodiments and depictions are disrupted by affordances of, and associations with, media; our abstraction; and, non-local ontologies (such as chronologic or geographic point-based representation). Our insights produce new design patterns by orienting us towards representing herb lore within the social-relational spaces that contextualise knowing, doing and moving, linked to corporeal and felt-experiences. More generally, uncovering transformations when media and narrative interact can improve analysis and designing for logics and literacies that profoundly differ from those typifying ubicomp.

Toward an Afro-Centric Indigenous HCI Paradigm

Current human–computer interaction (HCI) paradigms are deeply rooted in a Western epistemology that 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 researchers to pursue a more critical research agenda within an indigenous epistemology. In this article an Afro-centric paradigm is presented, 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. A practical realization of this paradigm shift within our own community-driven design in Southern Africa is illustrated.

Community Consensus: Design Beyond 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.

Putting it in perspective: designing a 3D visualization to contextualize indigenous knowledge in rural Namibia

One design endeavor we pursue in a long-term research and co-design project is the creation of a 3D visualization interface for an indigenous knowledge (IK) management system with rural dwellers of Herero ethnicity in Namibia. Evaluations of earlier prototypes and theories on cultural differences in perception led us to further investigate the suitability of different perspectives of view for the given user group. Through a combination of drawing sessions, design discussions and a high-fidelity technology probe we explored the visual perceptions and preferences of community members; specifically focusing on representation and recognition of objects and places in their everyday environment. We report how the findings from the study have informed design decisions for our particular system while also suggesting that certain viewing angles for 3D visualizations could be more suitable for rural dwellers in general and the collaborating community in specific.

The Art of Cross-Cultural Design for Usability

More and more HCI researchers and practitioners have realized the urgency of addressing culture as being more than just an interface tuning parameter. Recent publications, project initiatives and a growing number of globally dispersed collaborating workgroups explore cultural models for practical solutions. Yet many endeavors focus on singled out aspects thereby missing fundamental factors of cross-cultural design and evaluation such as contextual connotations, dynamics and integration. Thus a common research agenda should therefore be the de-construction of the entire process as a basis for a comprehensive integration of shared experiences, best practices and tested models to enhance cross-cultural design and evaluation.

Homestead creator: a tool for indigenous designers

The article presents in-situ findings of introducing a tablet prototype, with touch interaction and 3D graphical visualizations, to empower knowledgeable village elders in Namibia to locally re-create a 3D graphical context for previously recorded video clips of indigenous practices and narratives. Findings indicate that tablets enable those indigenous users to partake in design sessions more equally than with laptops and other input devices. Through a GUI design example we illuminate the unique opportunities and challenges in designing in the space where cultures meet.

Altering participation through interactions and reflections in design

In this paper, we illustrate through a set of examples how our own conceptualisation of participatory design (PD) and associated tools and techniques transforms within the design process itself. Co-designing with African rural communities has brought to light our many assumptions and intentions underlying commonly used methods and principles of PD. While genuinely striving for user involvement these same methods can hinder a truly participatory approach to design. We have learned much through our encounters and continuous reflections in various projects with southern African rural communities and seek to share our experiences in one particular, current project which led us to interrogate and revise our existing conceptions of PD. We also aim to infuse the evolution of PD with insights from Africa and cross-cultural design so that PD can better serve diversity globally.

A new visualization approach to re-contextualize indigenous knowledge in rural Africa

Current views of sustainable development recognize the importance of accepting the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) of rural people. However, there is an increasing technological gap between Elder IK holders and the younger generation and a persistent incompatibility between IK and the values, logics and literacies embedded, and supported by ICT. Here, we present an evaluation of new technology that might bridge generations and preserve key elements of local IK in Namibia. We describe how we applied insights, generated by ethnographic, dialogical and participatory action research, in designing a structure in which users can store, organize and retrieve user-generated videos in ways that are compatible with their knowledge system. The structure embeds videos in a scenario-based 3D visualization of a rural village. It accounts for some of the ways this rural community manages information, socially, spatially and temporally and provides users with a recognizable 3D simulated environment in which to re-contextualize de-contextualized video clips. Our formative in situ evaluation of a prototype suggests the visualization is legible to community members, provokes participation in design discussions, offers opportunities for local appropriation and may facilitate knowledge sharing between IK holders and more youthful IK assimilators. Simultaneously differing interpretations of scenarios and modeled objects reveal the limitations of our modeling decisions and raises various questions regarding graphic design details and regional transferability.