Interactions - January/February 2010

FORUM UNDER DEVELOPMENT

seeking to realize the potential of appropriately
encultured design, we need to teach African stu-
dents to critique the relevancy of system design
and development practices that originate in norms
produced elsewhere. However, enabling students
to enact such critical and reflective practice may
require them first to change their own cultural
practice in response to perceived authority, and
second, to do so within the reality of economics
and global power relationships.
It appears that IT students and professionals in
Africa manage their identities—within the culture
of IT and their home culture—in the context of
dissonance, conflicts, and multiple perspectives.
This is particularly clear in considering systems
design and development for rural environments.
Unlike migration patterns in the West, students
from rural areas in Southern Africa usually
intend to return home from the major cities once
they have accumulated sufficient income and
maintain ongoing and important kin relationships
with their home villages. They rarely intend to
practice professionally in their villages and have
difficulty envisioning the relevancy of their tech-
nical skills. This is not unsurprising since, despite
the contribution of the cell phone to rural con-
nectivity, computer systems are designed in and
for urban places and are ill-matched to rural life-
styles [ 5]. But the issues seem to be deeper than
prosaic opportunity; they implicate incompatibili-
ties of identity.
Both our observations of people in our research
in the remote rural area of the eastern cape of
South Africa [ 6] and Mozambique and our African
co-researchers with strong links to rural areas
show how difficult it is both to be part of a local
community and introduce new technologies and
practices. Of course, these issues are simply local-
ized versions of the general challenges of manag-
ing home and professional identity; articulating
aspects of one’s own domestic and intimate life;
and translating and conceptualizing informal
systems of knowledge in defining and developing
systems. The situation, however, is more acute
when these challenges are compounded by issues
of language, significant cultural gulfs, and global
power relations.
With such intractable difficulties, what should
we do to equip African students with the skills to
localize interaction design? We believe that train-
ing students overseas has limited impact, as many

do not return and those that do are arguably
even less equipped to tackle cultural translation
than those educated at home. On the other hand,
training overseas graduate students studying in
Africa has considerable potential to start the pro-
cess of integrating African scenarios and views
into global HCI. This strategy can only enrich the
practices, frameworks, and toolkits that we have
to draw upon for design and usability generally.
For example, our experience of Africans’ deep
appreciation of multiple perspectives and their
multilingual skills can broaden conceptual capac-
ity beyond that which is currently available in the
developed world.
Investing in specialized advanced courses in
Africa, for overseas students, may also begin to
redress bias in curricula exerted by the need for
African universities to gain international accredi-
tation. That is, it may open up opportunities for us
to more comprehensively insert African scenarios
and their consequences for computational think-
ing into a range of undergraduate subjects beyond
the conventional domain of HCI. However, for our
African students and teachers to engage with such
material, it needs to be supported by textbook con-
tent based on theoretically sound and authentic
real-world projects. So we are issuing two invita-
tions: Come to learn from Africa by staying here
for a while, and think about ways to enliven those
textbooks with stories from the ground.

[ 5] Bidwell, N.J. & Browning, D. “Pursuing Genius Loci: Interaction Design And Natural Places.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (First published online March 2009) Springer Verlag, 2010.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Nic Bidwell spent the
first few years of life in Africa and has been a Third
Culture Kid ever since. From 2003 she has focused
on designing interactions suited to rural contexts
and Australian indigenous and African cultural
views. In her research—most recently in South
[ 6] Bidwell, N. J.
“Anchoring Design in
Rural Ways of Doing
and Saying.” Interact
2009, Part 1. Ed. T.
Gross et al. Heidelberg:
Springer Berlin (2009),
686–699.

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus is dean of School of
Information Technology at the Polytechnic of
Namibia. She has lived in Namibia and lectured in
the field of software engineering at the University
and Polytechnic since 1994. Her Ph.D. research
explored cross-cultural design issues and suggests
a framework for culture-centered dialogical design. Since then her
research has focused on the cultural appropriation of design and
evaluation methods of information systems supporting local con-
tent creation, storage, organization, and retrieval.