“Oh beautiful dear
children who have
blossomed in yards
of each home.
Tomorrow you will
be running this
land. You have
to do as told by
your parents.”
“You have to learn
the lessons taught
by the schoolteacher. You have
to respect the
elders. You have
to be truthful in
speech and action.
Oh beautiful dear
children”
“Dear children”
• Figure 2. A song sung during a
children’s dance practice (#1229).
[ 6] Pringle I. and S.
Subramanian, eds.
“Experiences in ICT
Innovations for Poverty
Reduction.” UNESCO
Report, 2004.
• Figure 3. Cameraphone
interface to story-creation
application
was significantly favored over others because
people tended to watch stories related to their
own interest or profession, leading to a spread
of preferences. However, a small number of
functionally similar forms of story dominated
the corpus, indicating particular value to the
community. These included advertisements for
local produce and handicrafts, farming and business problems or processes (such as that shown
in Figure 1), and community news or advice.
While the first two types of story are related to
economic “development” issues, the third is not,
relating more to a form of personal and cultural
expression. Such content included mythical
tales, moral stories, festival recordings, advice to
children and the community, and the occasional
song such as that translated in Figure 2. This
was recorded by a teacher in a children’s dance
practice session.
In many ways the content of these stories
was similar to that of news items on a community radio station run in Budikote village called
Namma Dwanhi (“Our Voices”). In contrast to
the Internet, Namma Dwanhi is a popular and
effective way of sharing information in the area
[ 6]. However, in contrast to radio broadcasts, the
audio-photo narratives of the StoryBank system
are shorter, illustrated, and easier to create by a
broader section of the community, including children. They are also accessible at any time from
the community display and open to new forms
of mobile circulation and distribution between
people and places.
From a development perspective we have
begun to see this medium as an extension and
complement to community radio, rather than as
a new form of Internet access as we expected. A
future challenge is to bring these two perspectives together by reintroducing wide area or even
global communications into our architecture
and considering how spoken narrative content
can transfer outside the language speaking area
in which it was developed. We believe this will
involve the kind of mobile and situated device
ecology used in StoryBank, with new connections to paper-based information such as booklets, magazines, and posters. The mobile phone
is critical to this ecology because it forms the
bridge between large distributed information
repositories and local people, places, and things.
It can also serve as a new kind of multimedia
pen and paper as we have shown.
Because of price sensitivity and the community
orientation of life in developing communities,
phones and other technologies will continue to
be shared resources rather than personal ones
for some time to come. So another challenge for
Western designers is to shift from a user-centered
design approach to what we have called a “
com-munity-centered design” approach, involving different elements of a community in the design of
