Design(ing) 'Here' and 'There'

Diversifying Future-Making Through Itinerative Design

“…Such perspectives overlap with trans-national hci scholarship that studies innovation sites and cultures beyond California. Drawing on Taylor's influential work [50] and kindred calls for more reflective hci practice, Avle and Lindtner [6] study sites of technological innovation in Accra, Ghana and Shenzhen, China to tease out from their diversity some more general lessons. They found that "technology designers and producers in Accra and Shenzhen simultaneously critiqued and located their work in the same center-periphery discourse that [ .…”

“…However, this stance differs from Dourish and Mainwaring's strategy to "avoid the rhetoric of centre and periphery" [15,139] altogether, and again brings up the tensions between the local and the global, the situated and the universal. Both Avle and Lindtner [6] and Suchman [49] find nuance in Tsing's [52] characterisation that universals only ever exist as locally-enacted effects. Tsing's argument draws on post-colonial sensitivities that Irani et al [19] and Merritt and Bardzell [29] have brought to the attention of mainstream hci.…”

Making Sense of Africa's Emerging Digital Transformation and its Many Futures

“…Put differently, by designing and commercializing digital technologies (Avle & Lindtner, 2016), creating firms and anchoring new industry sectors on the African continent (Weiss & Weber, 2017a) more is at work than substantively meets the eye (Ndemo & Weiss, 2017). Direct or indirect, deliberate or accidental (Olopade, 2014) actions alter and form the societal context which hinders or impedes the realization of a digitally mediated society and the manifestation of new beliefs and values.…”

“…In the process of designing, the past, present and imagined future of a particular locale are fused by the creator into the final productbecoming a cultural artifact that embodies aspirations and a sense of imagined reputation vis-á-vis the global economic pecking order (Avle & Lindtner, 2016). Yet another example surfaces the importation of guidelines on how to perform technology entrepreneurship in African economies which prescribe new ideals and a new recipe for success.…”

“…Innovative technologies are created and adapted by engineers in Africa and deployed to national markets at unprecedented scale (Avle & Lindtner, 2016); simultaneously African startups are being turned into investment-ready vehicles following an imported script that sees success in the acquisition by crowded-in multinational companies and, in the same beat, African creators and users are involved in an emerging global cyber culture that seeks to transcend ideas of developing and developed, of North and South (Kaigwa, 2016). As much as this seeming messiness of interwoven and concurrent developments demonstrates the generativity of Africa's emerging digital transformation and has sets into motion vibrant economic activity in analog and digital markets, it is also an ideological undertaking that is at work on the very idea of Africa.…”