Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa

Bidwell, Nicola J.; Reitmaier, Thomas; Marsden, Gary; Hansen, Susan

doi:10.1145/1753326.1753564

Cited by 102 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…I was introduced to the area in 2008 (Bidwell 2009) by a researcher who had worked on technology projects with TransCape, a nonprofit organization based in south Mankosi (Tucker and Blake 2008). This enabled using TransCape's premises a year later for workshops to inform the design of a mobile digital storytelling application, MDSA, that we thought might be widely useful to users without access to computers or high-end phones in sharing life experiences and expressing their imagination digitally (Bidwell and Reitmaier et al 2010).…”

Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One LR, Jay, visited Cape Town to discuss with Thomas design issues and first versions of Audio Repository Bidwell and Siya 2013). They spoke of the contrast of the city and Mankosi (Bidwell et al 2013a), of Thomas' experiences in designing and evaluating MDSA (see: Bidwell and Reitmaier et al 2010;Reitmaier et al 2011;Reitmaier 2012) and Jay's experiences in trialling and teaching inhabitants to use MXShare. They also spoke about how Audio Repository would be introduced.…”

Section: Local Researchers and Other Inhabitantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The overall need to support oral practices emerged from my ethnography in a district adjacent to Mankosi (Bidwell 2009;; design workshops for the original MDSA (Bidwell and Reitmaier et al 2010); and, many subsequent engagements in Mankosi (e.g. Bidwell et al 2011a, b;Bidwell and Siya 2013;Bidwell et al 2013aBidwell et al , b, 2014b.…”

Section: Oralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thomas' engagement with extra-linguistic qualities of orality, in designing touch interactions, reflects his immersion in field evaluations in Kenya and in video of interactions in Mankosi to design the MDSA (Bidwell and Reitmaier et al 2010;Reitmaier et al 2011;Reitmaier 2012). He was particularly captivated by video of a workshop in Mankosi in which women recorded a story about unfolding events in a child's morning routine.…”

Section: Genres That Disembody Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Bidwell

2014

AI & Soc

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Efforts to design voice-based, social media platforms for low-literacy communities in developing countries have not widened access to information in the ways intended. This article links this to who describes the relations that constitute personhood and how these relations are expressed in designing and deploying systems. I make these links oriented by critique in human-computer interaction that design continues a history of colonialism and embeds meanings in media that disrupt existing communication practices. I explore how we translated 'logics' about sociality through logics located outside of the rural South African community that we targeted for design and deployment. The system aimed to enable inhabitants to record, store and share voice files using a portable, communally owned display. I describe how we engaged with inhabitants, to understand needs, and represented and abstracted from encounters to articulate requirements, which we translated into statements about technology. Use of the system was not as predicted. My analysis suggests that certain writing cultures, embedded in translations, reify knowledge, disembody voices and neglect the rhythms of life. This biases social media towards individualist logics and limits affordances for forms, genres and other elements of communication that contribute to sociality. Thus, I propose oral practices offer oppositional power in designing digital bubbles to support human togetherness and that we can enrich design by moving the centre-a phrase taken from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Moving the centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms, James Currey, London, 1993) who insists that liberation from colonialism requires plural sites of creativity. To realize this potential, we need radically different approaches that enable symmetrical translation.

show abstract

Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Local Researchers and Other Inhabitantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Oralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Genres That Disembody Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Bidwell

2014

AI & Soc

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The AR approach on the other hand operates at a higher level and it encourages designers to engage with the target community (while including them as participants). The process of participation requires that activities be used only in identifying locally relevant problems without placing any emphasis on technology aspects (Maunder et al, 2007;Bidwell et al, 2010). The difference between a typical AR approach and one that emphasizes participation is that AR requires the designer to collaborate with the target community whereas the participatory variant requires both the designer and the community to be in agreement as to: a.…”

Section: Participatory Action Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using a Participatory Action Research Approach to Design a Lecture Podcasting System

Ng’ambi

Marsden

Traxler

et al. 2012

International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although podcasting is popular in higher education, there is limited research on podcasting in developing institutions or resource constrained environments. There are fragmented implementations of podcasting projects by enthusiastic faculty but the tools used are often proprietary, imported from the West by administrators without any consultation with the lecturers who eventually use them. Similarly, many of these tools are used on a trial basis. The authors hypothesize that involving academics through user centered approaches to the design of educational applications will encourage them to use the tools. This paper reflects on a Participatory Action Research approach adopted in the design of a podcasting system. The research study incorporated a cyclical action model with four distinctive stages designed to guide the constituencies involved in the study to design, test, and possibly enhance the tool. The findings reveal some of the contextual phenomena that create both challenges and opportunities for a podcasting model.

show abstract

Sugar Ka Saathi – A Case Study Designing Digital Self-management Tools for People Living with Diabetes in Pakistan

Zeb

Lindsay

Shahid

et al. 2019

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents the results of an iterative participatory process to design a smart self-management tool for less-literate people living with diabetes in Pakistan. Initially, interviews and focus groups with sixty-nine people living with diabetes identified issues that they face when self-managing including uncontrollable factors, lack of diabetes awareness, low-tech mobile phones, and poor internet availability. We developed personas grounded in the scoping results and adjusted our PD approach to focus on more tangible design artefacts before running narrative scoping PD sessions. Working from older, illiterate persona, we designed a phone-line delivered Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. We developed a functional IVR Prototype "Sugar ka Saathi" (Diabetes Companion) with input from a group of 4 Pakistan-based healthcare professionals, to act as a design probe in the PD process. We tested the IVR probe with fifty-seven of the original scoping participants which validated the knowledge transferred by the IVR and its acceptability. Invisible design videos were shown to elaborate the IVR and community concept to thirteen participants through two filmed videos using our existing persona characters from the scoping studies, these videos helped to engage older people with diabetes in PD sessions.

show abstract

Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa

Cited by 102 publications

References 13 publications

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Using a Participatory Action Research Approach to Design a Lecture Podcasting System

Sugar Ka Saathi – A Case Study Designing Digital Self-management Tools for People Living with Diabetes in Pakistan

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About