Interactions - November/December 2012

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).