Kate Hennessy

How technology supports family communication in rural, suburban, and urban kenya

Much ICTD research for sub-Saharan Africa has focused on how technology related interventions have aimed to incorporate marginalized communities towards global economic growth. Our work builds on this. We present results from an exploratory qualitative study on the family communication practices of family members who communicate both within and between rural, suburban, and urban settings in Kenya. Our findings reveal that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, life advice, and everyday coordination of activities. We also outline social factors that affect family communication, including being an eldest child, having a widowed sibling, and having reduced access to technology because of gender, literacy, or ones financial situation. Lastly, we discuss new opportunities for technology design and articulate the challenges that designers will face if creating or deploying family communication technologies in Kenya.

The appropriation of a digital "speakers" corner: lessons learned from the deployment of mégaphone

Interactive digital technologies embedded in urban spaces typically tend to be used to deliver news, context-relevant information and commercial advertisements. To design urban technologies that will serve other ends, we first need to know how people might want to interact with them. Using an ethnographic approach, we collected field data in order to better understand this. This study presents some of the findings of our qualitative evaluation of MÉGAPHONE, an interactive artistic installation deployed in a public space in downtown Montréal, Canada. In this paper, we provide thick descriptions of our detailed field observations and interviews with participants conducted over the ten-week deployment with a deep focus on how users appropriated this system. Our results highlight four public interaction strategies as a set of abstractions that suggest how people might want to make use of interactive public installations: place-making, self-representing, first-person news reporting and bootstrapping online presence with digital recordings.

Roles of an Interactive Media Façade in a Digital Agora

As a component of urban civic infrastructures, interactive screen technology is often studied, designed and produced top-down style to accommodate the diverging interests of its stakeholders. However, some HCI researchers are calling for new interaction design strategies that could help close the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the study of situated interfaces used for civic engagement. Our paper reports on the public deployment of an interactive platform that might anticipate this next generation of situated interfaces. In Fall 2013, we conducted a ten-week qualitative field evaluation of Mégaphone, a digitally-augmented agora deployed in Montréals Quartier des Spectacles. Using ethnographic research methods, we collected data in-the-wild and conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with over 21 participants to understand why and how urbanites used the installation. This paper presents five conceptual categories that describe the most salient forms of interaction that we observed between users and Mégaphones voice-activated media façade.

Cultural Heritage on the Web: Applied Digital Visual Anthropology and Local Cultural Property Rights Discourse

The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangi- ble Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safe- guarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation—or restriction—of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.

Beyond the vision paradigm: design strategies for crossmodal interaction with dynamic digital displays

The purpose of our research is to develop new interaction paradigms for dynamic digital displays (DDDs) in public space. Our lab is currently developing an ontological framework that comprises seven different interaction paradigms for DDDs. Still in its budding stages, this framework is intended to assist HCI practitioners in the conception and evaluation of architectural scale DDD installations. This paper theoretically discusses crossmodal interaction as one of these seven interaction paradigms. We used an architectural approach that draws on medium specificity --- a fine arts concept foreign to HCI --- to conduct a phenomenological analysis of DDDs that have been deployed in an actual public space in Montréal, Canada. After interviewing DDD design artists and performing our preliminary observational analyses, we found four design strategies that were used to produce crossmodal interaction on an architectural scale, helping shift the experience of DDDs beyond the vision paradigm.

Sharing deep history as digital knowledge: An ontology of the Sq’éwlets website project

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, and relation. This paper presents an ontology of the Sq’éwlets Virtual Museum of Canada Website Project, a project that has focused on creating a digital community biography of the Sq’éwlets First Nation (www.digitalsqewlets.ca). Based on several decades of community archaeology and the recent production of short video documentaries, the website presents a long-term perspective of what it means to be a Sq’éwlets person and community member today. We explore how this project came to focus on the nature of being Sq’éwlets; how community members conceived the nature, structure, and nomenclature of the website; and how this Sq’éwlets being-ness is translated for outside audiences. We suggest what lessons this approach has for anthropological conventions of naming and knowing as they relate to Indigenous histories, and consider how archaeological knowledge can be transformed into a digital platform within a community-based process.

Belongings: a tangible interface for intangible cultural heritage

Belongings is an interactive tabletop using a tangible user interface to explore intangible cultural heritage. The table was designed for the [see PDF], the city before the city exhibition. This exhibition is a partnership of three major institutions in Vancouver, BC, exploring the significant ancient village site on which part of Vancouver was built, as well as Musqueam culture and community today. The tabletop uses replicas of Musqueam belongings excavated from [see PDF], as well as contemporary objects that are a part of everyday Musqueam life to access information about the long history of salmon fishing and the continuity of related knowledge at [see PDF]. The design of [see PDF] -- Belongings highlights the tensions between fragmentation and continuity that are central to discussions of access and preservation of intangible cultural heritage in the digital age. In this paper we discuss the tangible tabletop interface as a response to the desire to reconnect fragmented collections and physical belongings from [see PDF] with Musqueam intangible cultural knowledge.

(Ukulele) Strings of Knowledge: Tactile and Digital Interactivity with Archives and Ethnography

Ukulele: An Interactive Biography and Liliuokalani: Archival Experimentations are ethnographic art installations that utilize a musical instrument as a platform for telling an ethnographic story. The ukulele used in the installations was borrowed from a musician as a representation of personal-cultural belongings, material heritage, utilitarian sites of knowledge, lived experience, and as a physical template for embodied scholarship. Installation participants are invited to pluck the ukulele strings to generate sensory visual stories that can be experienced in a non-linear manner. The media content includes original audio and video material as well as (experimentally-modified) images sourced from public archives. These projects represent a playful experimentation with discourse on material culture, intangible cultural heritage and sensory methodologies to create prototypes for what could be termed “interactive anthropology.”

Design Interactions in ?elәwk w : Belongings

Our pictorial visually describes ?elәwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible tabletop installed in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The tabletop was designed to communicate the continuity of Musqueam culture, convey the complexity of belongings that were excavated from Musqueams ancient village site, and reconnect those belongings to traditional practices and oral histories through tangible interactions with the table-all while highlighting that cultural knowledge should be treated with respect. In this pictorial, we will show how the design process was shared among researchers, curators, and the exhibit Advisory Committee and highlight some of the key design decisions that came out of this collaboration.

Critical reflections on safeguarding culture: the intangible cultural heritage and museums field school in Lamphun, Thailand.

Abstract This article examines the educational approaches taken by the Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museums Field School in Lamphun, Thailand, organized by the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre (SAC). Since 2009, the Field School, which takes place over a period of two weeks, has brought together fifty-five heritage professionals from throughout South East Asia to learn about intangible cultural heritage and its safeguarding. Through classroom lectures and discussions, participants are introduced to both the practical and theoretical aspects of sustaining intangible cultural heritage. Through in situ, community-based exercises, participants are given an opportunity to apply research tools and approaches that encourage building collaborative relationships with local communities, as well as learning about intangible cultural expressions from the perspectives of their practitioners and within their source environments. The Field School also actively promotes critical reflection on the limits and challenges of implementing the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) mandate as they emerge from the field practicum exercise. Such challenges include issues of representation, power relations, and decision-making within the community—complex issues which are left unaddressed in both the 2003 UNESCO ICH Convention and the 2012 Operational Directives.