Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor

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.

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.

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.

Observations from Teaching HCI to Chinese Students in Australia

In this position paper we present our view that Chinese international students in Australia are aided by the emphasis on student-centred learning and theory in practice in Australian tertiary instruction, even though this learning culture may contrast with the previous experiences of these students. We base our position on observations drawn from those with involvement in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course offered at the Australian National University.

Targeting the Endogenous Pain Modulation System

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been applied recently over the primary motor cortex and has recently been shown to neuroplasticity of the endogenous pain modulation (EPM) system. The aim of the current study is to present early results related to motor cortex and spinal neuroplasticity control of the EPM in healthy volunteers by measuring pressure pain threshold and cold pain intensity as outcome measures before and after M1 cortex or suboccipital DCS. Healthy volunteers (aged 18–40 years), in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, clinical trial, were assigned to four DCS groups: sham-M1 cortex DCS, active-M1 cortex DCS, sham-suboccipital (SODCS) and active-SODCS. Data collected to date suggest that both M1 and spinal-DCS modulate thermal noxious stimuli. However, the demonstration of EPM neuroplasticity requires careful attention to the test and conditioning paradigm.

New literacy theories for participatory design: lessons from three design cases with Australian Aboriginal communities

Literacy and power are closely entwined, and not all literacy practices are equally supported and recognised within dominant discourses and political structures. Technology design offers new possibilities for supporting culturally-diverse literacy practices, including the preservation and maintenance of endangered languages. While literacy is an inherent aspect of design work, theories of literacy as a social practice encompassing a variety of different senses and modes of expression are under-utilised within the design community. We survey the current landscape on literacy and design, and illustrate how six lenses of new literacy theory articulated by Kathy Mills [1] can support us to be more attentive to the literacy practices enacted in design through their application to three design cases with Australian Aboriginal communities. Finally, we reflect on our own Digital Community Noticeboard project to contribute four ways that new literacy theory can inform participatory 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.

Design participation lab

How would you describe your lab to visitors? At the Design Participation Lab, our projects have a humanitarian or environmental focus. We work with Indigenous communities, older people, children with autism, and people with intellectual disabilities, seeking to understand how they appropriate technologies and how we might co-design desirable technologies. We value pluralism, seeking to make technologies that reflect the rich diversity and idiosyncrasies of people and the ways in which they wish to interact. Recently we have extended our work to exploring interaction between people and nature. Working with ecologists, eco-acoustics researchers, communities, and government organizations, we aim toward new kinds of socio-enviro-technical systems that make it easier, more interesting, and more fun to monitor and understand species.

Domain Exploration of ICT Use in Consumer-to-Producer Feedback Loops within the Fair Trade System

Information and communications technology (ICT) plays an important role in facilitating information flows through fair trade supply chains. While previous research has focused on the role of ICT in providing consumers with fair trade producer information, few studies have considered the operation of feedback loops from consumers to producers, particularly in an Australian context. This qualitative study provides a novel contribution in this area through a domain exploration of the consumer-to-producer feedback loops in the fair trade system and the role of ICT in facilitating these supply chain communications. We have used ethnographic techniques through semi-structured interviews with consumer, importer, and producer links in the supply chain, analysing and refining our data using a grounded-theory approach. The discussion engages with emerging themes addressing the actual information needs of producers, attributes of existing feedback loops, and the role of ICT in fair trade handicraft supply chains. We explore the function of intermediaries in the supply chains who aggregate, filter and interpret feedback that flows from the consumers and importers through to the producer organisations and the artisans who produce the goods. Finally, we consider potential future applications of ICT to fair trade feedback loops and associated design sensitivities to ensure that feedback offered by consumers and importers satisfies producer information needs, establishing new avenues of enquiry in the field of HCI for Development (HCI4D).