Nicola J. Bidwell

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.

Experiences, challenges and lessons from rolling out a rural WiFi mesh network

The computing for development community knows that technology interventions involve consideration of social, technical and environmental factors. Research into WiFi solutions has fallen off as ubiquitous mobile solutions penetrate even the deepest rural communities worldwide. This paper argues that the latest wave of WiFi mesh networks offers benefits that traditional top-down WiFi and mobile networks do not. In addition, we propose ethnographic and participatory methods to aid the effective rollout of mesh inverse infrastructure with and for a given community. This paper describes and then analyzes a mesh for voice rollout within a situated context. We explain how to conduct informed community co-design and how to factor in local socio-political concerns that can impact on the design, rollout and subsequent maintenance of community-based wireless mesh networks. While we have not yet analyzed baseline and initial usage data, we do have new lessons to offer.

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.

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.

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.

Namibian and american cultural orientations toward facebook

Nadkarni and Hofmans [8] meta-review of literature on Facebook usage recommends examining differences in Facebook use between collectivistic and individualistic cultures. We discuss early findings of an exploratory study to compare use between participants in America, Namibia, and expatriate Namibians. From this, we identified five key areas of difference: 1) Motivations for joining Facebook; 2) Attitude toward Facebook connections; 3) Self presentation and photo sharing; 4) Communication about death, religion, and politics; 5) General privacy definitions. However, our findings showed no statistical difference in the Collectivism Scale [10] administered among the three groups, despite Namibia being considered a highly collectivistic county [12] and the US being a highly individualistic country [6].

Re-framing HCI through local and indigenous perspectives

This one-day workshop aims to present different local and indigenous perspectives from all over the world in order to lead into an international dialogue on re-framing concepts and models in HCI/Interaction Design. The target audience is HCI researchers and practitioners who have experience with working with culture and HCI. The expected outcome of the workshop is a) network building among the participants, b) a shortlist of papers that can be basis for a proposal for a special issue of the UAIS journal, and c) identify opportunities to develop a funded network or research proposal.