people in developing countries who
do not have transport [ 7]. In the village I inhabit people walk between
buildings for cooking, sitting, and
sleeping that make up homesteads,
and between the homesteads of
extended families who have inhabited the area for generations. They
walk to dams, communal taps, forests, and grassland to do laundry
and collect water, fuel, and building
materials. And they walk between
kraals, pastures, and dips; between
school, church, and clinic; and to
spaza shops to charge cellphones.
Recognizing, identifying, and sharing meanings about sound and
voices along these many paths contribute to continuity with the past
and belonging to a social collectivity.
Meanings associate with, and are
shaped by, daily and seasonal cycles,
activities, and rituals, and by social
bonds, structures, institutions, and
protocols. Walking helped me interpret local perspectives about access
to a mobile cellphone-charging station that we deployed in Eastern
Cape. And it was by being chastised
for my “unladylike” (in Namibia)
or “unsociable” (in South Africa)
stride that I realized that walking
performs identity and contributes to
social cohesion.
From my experience, walking
along the paths of those marginalized in technology design can help
us begin to address disconnects that
arise from our tendency to be most
accountable to the social groups
in which our constructs about self
belong. The selves in my Eastern
Cape setting are not the same as
me, but by regularly sharing, crossing, and watching their paths, they
are not exactly “other” either. My
walking is visible to many around
me and has become familiar to,
and possibly even resonant with,
some. In our going along, neither I
nor local researchers can escape the
Acknowledgements
I thank all who have walked with me,
in particular local researchers in Eastern
Cape, the traditional healer in Namibia
and indigenous groups in Australia,
and my academic accomplices Heike
Winschiers-Theophilus, truna, and David
Browning. I am grateful for the insights
of Margot Brereton, Ann Light, Edwin
Blake, and Paul Dourish; the encouragement of Mark Rouncefield; the patience of
Gary Marsden; and the unwavering support of Paula Kotze.
paths of those on whom we inflict
applications unsuited to their literacies and constraints. For instance,
we could not just drive away after
introducing a visual-oriented,
text-based media-sharing prototype. Rather, our accountability,
generated by everyday encounters,
compelled us to design something
suited to local practices. In this
case we designed a modest Audio
Repository [ 8] that, six months
later, inhabitants continue to use
within face-to-face communication
and for asynchronous sharing.
Situating our accountability and
our representing in HCI’s periphery
broadens the scope for technological solutions. For instance, when
designing the Audio Repository and
Pacemaker I realized that advances
in media and interfaces for sound
and voice lag far behind the visual
domain and that asynchronous
voice remains relatively unexplored.
Representing sounds and their
meanings and creating sound-based
interfaces pose challenges, not least
because sound dissipates, reflects,
and leaks and has other complex
spatial and temporal properties.
However, as I hope this article confirms, inspiration for solving some
of these challenges surely lies in the
alongness of life, not in situations
isolated in labs and studios or by the
dominant topographies we apply
when we collect, log, and represent
information about remote places. So,
before I walk over the hill to charge
my laptop at the NGO, I invite you
to share new paths along which to
form the world. We could aspire to
the Honey Bee Network’s practice of
walking to “discover” local innovators among rural India’s economically poor [ 9]. But, meanwhile, we
might just try to better incorporate
our walking-along bodies into design
by leaving behind the devices that
constrain our world to points.
ENDNOTES:
1. Ingold, T. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge,
London, 2007.
2. Bidwell, N. J., Reitmaier, T., Marsden, G., and
Hansen, S. Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa. Proc. CHI’ 10. ACM Press, New
York, 2010, 1593-1602.
3. Bidwell, N. J., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Koch-Kapuire, G., and Chivuno-Kuria, S. Situated interactions between audiovisual media and African
herbal lore. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 15,
6 (2011), 609-627.
4. Bidwell, N. J. and Winschiers-Theophilus, H.
Audio Pacemaker: Walking, talking indigenous
knowledge. Proc. Annual Research Conf. of the
South African Institute for Computer Scientists and
Information Technologists (Gauteng, South Africa).
2012.
5. Bidwell, N. J. Ubuntu in the network: Humanness
in social capital in rural South Africa. interactions
17, 2 (2010), 68-71.
6. Pink, S. Mobilising visual ethnography: Making
routes, making place and making images. Open
Journal Systems 9, 3 (2008), 36.
7. www.worldbank.org/transport/transportresults/
headline/ rural-access.html
8. Reitmaier, T., Bidwell, N. J., Siya, M., Marsden,
G., and Tucker, B. Designing an asynchronous oral
repository for rural African communities. Proc. IST-Africa (Dar es Salem, Tanzania). 2012.
9. Towards inverted model of innovation. Honey
Bee Network Magazine 22, 3 (2011).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nic Bidwell is a principal
researcher at CSIR-Meraka and
an associate professor at Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan University,
South Africa. Since 2003 she has
focused on HCI for rural contexts
and Australian Indigenous and African cultural
views and applied situated, ethnographic, and par-
ticipatory research methods. This article is extract-
ed from her keynote at Participatory Design
Conference 2012 (August 17, 2012. Roskilde,
Denmark).
November + December 2012
DOI: 10.1145/2377783.2377797
© 2012 ACM 1072-5520/12/11 $15.00