Rebecca Walton

Value-Sensitive Design and Health Care in Africa

In this paper, we describe our approach of using value-sensitive design to guide the design, development, and implementation of health information systems for use in rural areas of two developing countries in Africa. By using shared conceptual investigation, we are able to create a generalized list of stakeholders and values that span multiple projects without losing any of the power of the conceptual investigation. This process can be applied to other projects to develop a stronger set of stakeholders and values. We also present a technical investigation of a vaccine delivery project in Sub-Saharan Africa and plans for an upcoming empirical investigation for a mobile-phone-based support tool for community health workers in East Africa.

Values and Validity: Navigating Messiness in a Community-Based Research Project in Rwanda

Community-based research in technical communication is well suited to supporting empowerment and developing contextualized understandings, but this research is messy. Presenting fieldwork examples from an interdisciplinary technical communication/medical anthropology study in Rwanda, this article conveys challenges that the authors encountered during fieldwork and their efforts to turn the messy constraints of community-based research into openings. Explicitly considering values and validity provided a strategy for our efforts to democratically share power, maximize rigor, and navigate uncertainty.

An interactive multimedia framework for digital heritage narratives

The cultural heritage of a region is conveyed by both tangible physical artifacts and intangible aspects in the form of stories, dance styles, rituals, etc. Hitherto, the task of creating digital representations for each of these aspects has been addressed in isolation, i.e. using specific media most suited to the artifact such as video, audio, three-dimensional (3D) models, scanning, etc. The challenge of bringing together these separate elements to create a coherent story, however, has remained unaddressed until recently. In this paper we present a unified digital framework that enables the integration of disparate representations of heritage elements into a holistic entity. Our approach results in a compelling and engaging narration that affords a unified user experience. Our solution supports both active (user-controlled explorations) and passive (watching pre-orchestrated narrations) user interactions. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework through a qualitative user study based on two rich interactive narratives built using our framework: (1) history and folklore surrounding a temple in South India, and (2) a historical account of an educational institution also in South India.

Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication

ABSTRACT This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.

Mobile phone users in Kyrgyzstan: A case study of identifying user requirements for diverse users

Mobile phones are widely recognized as a potentially transformative technology platform for developing nations. However, for designers and programmers in the developed world to create viable applications for mobile phones involves first identifying and communicating user requirements for diverse users. We define diverse users as those from a substantively different cultural context than that in which the technology design occurs, including developing regions. This paper presents a case study outlining our process of using data from prior research to (1) identify a tenable mobile phone product concept for mobile phone users in Kyrgyzstan; (2) detect and communicate user requirements for that product concept to a design team; and (3) develop a working prototype of the concept for usability testing. Our resulting concept meets important user needs and goals for mobile phone users in Kyrgyzstan. We believe the process by which we developed and discuss these user requirements and the subsequent prototype can serve as an example to others concerned with creating user-centered products and services for diverse users including those in developing countries.

The Role of Information and Communication in the Context of Humanitarian Service

Information and communication are playing an increasingly important and more sophisticated role in humanitarian-service activities involving logistics, organizational learning, health-care delivery systems, assessment, and education. This role is impacted by important trends and environments within which the humanitarian sector operates. These include a shift of focus from providing direct aid to capacity building, empowerment, and assessment; a shift in project focus from technical solutions to broader sociotechnical strategies; and increased emphasis on demonstrating effectiveness, improving efficiency, and collaborating with other organizations. Five articles in this issue address these areas, including two pieces on developing information and communication tools to support the work of humanitarian organizations, two pieces on preparing students to work in the humanitarian environment, and one on organizational culture and the challenge of enhancing organizational learning in the humanitarian sector.

Stakeholder Flux Participation in Technology-Based International Development Projects

Technical communication increasingly occurs in distributed, cross-cultural, and cross-organizational environments in which stakeholders may have widely disparate—even conflicting—perspectives. Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is one such environment. Balancing complex and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is a challenge, and unstable stakeholder participation is a widespread problem in ICTD projects. The study presented here shows that stakeholders’ participation in a project was sustained most easily when the value that the stakeholders would gain from such participation was congruent with their respective national and organizational cultures. This study has implications for technical communicators working on cross-organizational projects, particularly projects that occur in distributed, cross-cultural environments.

How Trust and Credibility Affect Technology-Based Development Projects

Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) involves using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the well-being of people in resource-constrained environments. Because ICTD projects involve crafting technical information and the ICTs that convey it, ICTD involves challenges familiar to technical communicators, such as balancing stakeholder interests and building credibility necessary to influence stakeholders. This article presents how trust and credibility affect ICTD projects, describing implications for development contexts and for distributed work environments.

Supporting Human Dignity and Human Rights: A Call to Adopt the First Principle of Human-Centered Design

Technical and professional communication (TPC), like human-centered design, has long been human centric. But TPC struggles with the complexities of determining which humans are at the center of our work. This article proposes that an explicit consideration of human dignity and human rights can help us to navigate these complexities by reflecting upon whether our work harmonizes with the notion that every person has intrinsic worth. To illustrate, I present findings from exploratory research with nonelite Rwandan youth in which participants conveyed the roles and effects of technology-mediated communication and information and communication technology in their lives. I assert that as TPC begins engaging more explicitly with human dignity and human rights, we should adopt a perspective inspired by human-centered design scholar Richard Buchanan: embracing human dignity and human rights as the first principle of communication and the foundational value of the TPC field.

How Humanitarian Culture Informs Change Adoption: A Case Study of Humanitarian Logistics

This chapter presents a longitudinal case study of change management within a geographically distributed emergency logistics team at a large international humanitarian organization. We found four categories of factors affecting change adoption: (1) individual barriers to change, (2) individual drivers of change, (3) collective barriers to change, and (4) collective drivers of change. These factors reflected specific instances of humanitarian culture at play in influencing whether change is adopted. Our findings identified not only singular factors but, more importantly, the interplay among factors that contributed to the ultimate outcome—whether change was adopted. Key findings include that (1) individual barriers have a stronger influence for advancing or inhibiting change in humanitarian teams and (2) collective factors establish an environment that can either catalyze or prohibit individual change factors. These findings have practical implications for facilitating change adoption in humanitarian organizations.