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