Browsing by Author "Marsden, Gary"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Communicating in designing an oral repository for rural African villages
    (IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2012) Reitmaier, Thomas; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Marsden, Gary; Tucker, William David
    We describe designing an asynchronous, oral repository and sharing system that we intend to suit the needs and practices of rural residents in South Africa. We aim to enable users without access to personal computers to record, store, and share information within their Xhosa community using cellphones and a tablet PC combined with their existing face-to-face oral practices. Our approach recognises that systems are more likely to be effective if the design concept and process build on existing local communication practices as well as addressing local constraints, e.g. cost. Thus, we show how the objectives for the system emerged from prolonged research locally and how we communicated insights, situated in the community, into the process of design and development in a city-based lab. We discuss how we integrated understandings about communication between situated- and localresearchers and designers and developers and note the importance of recognising and centralising subtle differences in our perception of acts of oral communication. We go on to show how the materiality of the software, the tablet form factor, and touch interaction style played into our collaborative effort in conceiving the design.
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    Evaluating the relevance of the “Real Access” criteria as a framework for rural HCI research
    (ACM, 2006) Maunder, Andrew; Marsden, Gary; Tucker, William David
    Developing ICT software that is useful and usable in a rural context poses many problems. One of the major difficulties is understanding the real needs of the target users and the constraints imposed by the rural environment. Many techniques exist in the field of human computer interaction (HCI) that attempt to understand the needs of the target user but many are not useful in a rural context (or a least not when applied in a standard way). This paper presents some existing HCI research techniques that are applicable in a rural context and shows how they fit into the Bridges.org ‘Real Access’ framework.
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    MUTI Telehealth
    (2007) Tucker, William David; Vuza, Xolisa; Chetty, Marshini; Blake, Edwin H.; Marsden, Gary; Pearson, Murray; Westerveld, Rudi
    For four years we have been iteratively evolving MUTI, a rural telehealth system, for hospitals and clinics in a remote rural part of the Eastern Cape in South Africa (Chetty, 2005; Chetty et al., 2003, 2004a; Maunder et al., 2006; Vuza, 2006; Vuza & Tucker, 2004). MUTI enables nurses and doctors to use a wireless Internet Protocol-based communication system to conduct patient referrals, request ambulance services, order supplies and generally keep in contact with one another. The primary community-oriented goal was to prevent unnecessary travel by sick patients from the clinic to the hospital, as transportation in these poverty-stricken and geographically dispersed areas is difficult and expensive for the local inhabitants. We hope that the system can enable nurses at the clinic to learn how to treat a wide range of problems locally by consulting with doctors that they normally do not meet or even speak with. We also hope that the system will lessen the workload for doctors at the hospital. As we expected, integrating new technologies into their everyday work lives is not straightforward or easy.
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    Open user interconnect and quality of communication
    (Telkom, 2004) Tucker, William David; Blake, Edwin H.; Marsden, Gary
    We looked for and found two situations within the South African Digital Divide where constant and severe macro-scale latencies would most likely interfere with the usage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions. We describe how these systems tend to exhibit both social and technical macro-scale delays. Our experience building bridges for these communities has inspired several innovations with respect to the design, development and measurement of IP communications systems. The main contribution is the Open User Interconnect (OUI) stack, a communications system model that explicitly includes the user in relation to the underlying network. The OUI stack is orthogonal to the Open System Interconnect stack. There are two outcomes from including the user in the model. First, the OUI approach necessitates the adoption of usercentred methods such as Participatory Design and in the case of the South African Digital Divide, the adoption of Action Research principles. The second outcome is a user-centred measurement notion, called Quality of Communication (QoC), that is a macro-scale spin on Quality of Service. QoC explicitly includes the measurement of user behaviour in addition to system metrics. In conclusion, we suggest that these Digital Divide-inspired contributions may be applicable to IP communications system design, development and measurement in general. The paper concludes with a brief dissertation completion plan.
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    Please call ME.N.U.4EVER: designing for “Callback” in rural Africa
    (Product & Systems Internationalisation, Inc, 2011) Bidwell, Nicola J.; Lalmas, Mounia; Marsden, Gary; Dlutu, Bongiwe; Ntlangano, Senzo; Manjingolo, Azola; Tucker, William David; Jones, Matt; Robinson, Simon; Vartiainen, Elina; Klampanos, Iraklis
    Designers and developers are naïve about the ways impoverished people in rural Africa innovate new uses of mobile technology to circumvent access difficulties. Here, we report on the local appropriation of an USSD ‘Callback’ service in a rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape which enables people to send free text messages and includes strategies that respond to severe constraints on message length and local communication protocols. This report shows that a participative approach, in which community members co-generate methods and interpret data, elicits major and formerly unreported findings. We describe the results of two sets of interviews about the use of cell-phones and Callback locally and the implications of this use for designing and realizing a media-sharing system. Our findings indicate that the community needs a system to charge phones and share media without consuming airtime and functionality for the 70-80% of people who do not own high-end phones. Use of Callback suggests people will manage a system to create, store and share content at a local ‘station’ but notify others about content using separate networks. Callback-use reveals local priorities that shape: the meaning of usability and utility; the ways people manage sequences of communication; and, the ‘rules’ that enable people to use Callback for multiple purposes and make sense of Callbacks despite ambiguity. These priorities inform introducing prototypes and contribute to exploring the communication patterns that might, subsequently, emerge.
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    Reflection on three years of rural wireless Internet Protocol communication
    (Telkom, 2007) Tucker, William David; Blake, Edwin H.; Marsden, Gary; Pearson, Murray; Westerveld, Rudi
    This paper reports on three years of research and fieldwork with a rural wireless Internet Protocol communication project. We built a long-range WiFi network and custom communication software to support a rural telehealth project in the remote Eastern Cape. We report on our work using cellular networks, devices and applications as reference technologies because our users and beneficiaries are very comfortable with them. Of most concern are the technological and contextual issues affecting take up of the systems we designed. The paper intends to provide a summary analysis of our experience so that others in the field can learn from our successes and mistakes with respect to rural Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) in a South African context.
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    Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa
    (Association for Computing Machinery, 2013) Bidwell, Nicola J.; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Marsden, Gary; Tucker, William David; Tshemese, M.; Gaven, N.; Ntlangano, Senzo; Robinson, Simon; Eglinton, Kristen Ali
    We consider practices that sustain social and physical environments beyond those dominating sustainable HCI discourse. We describe links between walking, sociality, and using resources in a case study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Like 360 million rural Africans, inhabitants of these villages are poor and, like 25% and 92% of the world, respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We describe nine practices in using the charging stations we deployed. We recorded 700 people using the stations, over a year, some regularly. We suggest that the way we frame practices limits insights about them, and consider various routines in using and sharing local resources to discover relations that might also feature in charging. Specifically, walking interconnects routines in using, storing, sharing and sustaining resources, and contributes to knowing, feeling, wanting and avoiding as well as to different aspects of sociality, social order and perspectives on sustainability. Along the way, bodies acquire literacies that make certain relationalities legible. Our study shows we cannot assert what sustainable practice means a priori and, further, that detaching practices from bodies and their paths limits solutions, at least in rural Africa. Thus, we advocate a more “alongly” integrated approach to data about practices.