Located accountabilities in technology production
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems - Special issue on Ethnography and intervention
The network in the garden: an empirical analysis of social media in rural life
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A resource kit for participatory socio-technical design in rural kenya
CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The landscape's apprentice: lessons for place-centred design from grounding documentary
Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
Rural encounters: cultural translations through video
Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Designing for Habitus and Habitat
Assumptions considered harmful: the need to redefine usability
UI-HCII'07 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Usability and internationalization
Situating digital storytelling within African communities
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural africa
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) - Special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI
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An increasing range of initiatives aim to enable rural communities in developing regions to generate their own, non-text based, digital content to share local stories, information and concerns. Video, photos and audio offer new resources for practices that give communities' a sense of identity and continuity and that members acquire in relationships with each other, their environment and history via speech, gesture, song, music, drama, ritual, skills or crafts. However, these contexts pose challenges for designing interactions within frameworks that have a heritage of text and indirect orality and which emphasize particular communication dynamics and structures. We seek to create new design directions based on insights into local ways of `doing and saying' gained in interactions with people living under traditional law and custom in the Xhosa Kingdom of Pondoland, South Africa. This paper distils themes from an ethnography when the author lived according to local norms and constraints and cogenerated design activities, situated in the community's priorities, customary power relations and consensus-based practice. We reflect on communication in ordinary and extraordinary activities, and sociotechnical `experiments' from using social networking websites to storytelling with blogs. We describe how indexicality dynamically shares context and entwines a person's identity with physical setting; and, how practices, such as prolonged discussion, diachronic repetition and synchronous utterance, build rapport, collective memory and cohesion. We propose that these practices inspire ways that local social structures can impact on activities to design systems of organization for information sharing, with occasional reference to our observations of other rural peoples in north Mozambique and north Australia.