Browsing by Author "Robinson, Simon"

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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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    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.