non-visual cues about the person
on the other end of a phone call;
that rhythms in walking help us to
sense our own and others’ presence
in simulations; that conversation
shapes our experience of our bodies
when we use a phone while moving;
and that cross-national studies suggest relationships between norms of
walking and social, economic, and
cultural factors. I situated the Audio
Pacemaker’s potential for supporting
African rural knowledge in observations that suggest the healer’s IK
links spatiality to social bonds and
relationships. So, I represented a
concept that emerged in my own
continual corporal and kinaesthetic
experience by integrating interpretations from distinct, disconnected,
geographic milieus.
By going along in Eastern Cape,
after living here for a cumulative
two years, I embody knowledge in
ways that approaches to designing
for distant contexts do not empha-
size. I, and researchers from the
rural community, usually gather
data in circumstances of communi-
cation that are fairly normal, locally.
We interview, observe, converse,
propose, and decide, along paths
and roads, at football matches and
ceremonies, and in gardens and
meetings outdoors. This contrasts
with practices that accumulate data
in short “field” trips by integrating
meanings from differentiated sites,
such as when various collaborators
conduct interviews and workshops
inside selected buildings, which
they access by car, to ensure that
recordings were audible and batter-
ies charged. Ingold uses the term
occupant knowledge to describe form-
ing meaning by upwardly integrat-
ing separate observations made at
discrete locations [ 1]. And, certainly,
we reproduce the very topographies
that have already marginalized the
digital have-nots when we scaffold
design with meanings generated
at points that are convenient to our
research schedules and tools, and to
our transits in foreign lands.
Our fluency in certain representations obscures how our bodies form
knowledge by interacting with terrains and the people we accompany
or pass. Regardless of whether our
mobility is global or geographically
restricted, we use various linguistic
and cognitive tools that differentiate
origins, termini, intersections, and
locations between them, to manage
the complexity of a world that we
inhabit topo-kinetically. However, at
the same time these tools can distance us from settings, since fixed
absolutes, such as north, lie nowhere
in the world, and visual media
invoke spatio-temporal summaries,
boundaries, and separations [ 1].
Our use of point-based representations also often conveys a philosophy about self and personhood
that may not hold in all societies
and that has its own consequences
for sharing information. In a past
interactions article I compared concepts about self in HCI with classical
African narratives about human
relatedness [ 5]. HCI tends to universalize a model of the individualized self and constructs users as
preexistent nodes in a network.
But philosophy across sub-Saharan
Africa tends to consider that each
person exists because other people
exist. Representations that emphasize people’s separateness are
entrenched in paradigms for sharing
information. For example, authors
and readers of print, photography,
and hypertext construct meaning independently, which differs
from the ongoing mutual exchange
that enables us to match paces
when we walk and talk together.
Ambling in Africa sensitized me
to how walking relates to acoustics
and contributes to all sociality.
Urban mobilities and routes influence visual culture [ 6] and surely
foot passages must shape the local
aural culture of the billion rural