HCI practitioners in development contexts utilize collaborative digital technologies for community engagement in international development, often mediated through platforms like social media, tele-conferencing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). However, the lack of standardized representation approaches for these platforms impedes effective communication among stakeholders. We propose a unified graphical framework for characterizing and representing collaborative platforms, focusing on audio/voice-based engagements. Our framework segments community engagement sessions into engagement formats, characterizing them with preconditions, configurations, and outputs, and visualizes them using state machine-based representations. A field study demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in supporting stakeholder communication for real-life scenarios. We contribute to CSCW literature by providing a standardized approach that offers a common framework/language for discussing, developing, or reconfiguring collaborative platforms. Our findings show that this framework enables non-governmental organizations and researchers to navigate under-explored design spaces, enhancing the utilization of voice-based platforms for engaging distributed marginalized communities.

Driven by pragmatic, cost-related, and environmental factors, voice-based remote community engagement tools (such as Interactive Voice Response) are emerging as a key modality for engaging marginalized communities. These voice-based digital solutions offer new opportunities for distributed community engagement and empowerment, and the ability to capture, store, and access a wide range of different records (i.e., recordings, interactions and contextual metadata) associated with community engagements. This potential for large scale, distributed community record collection necessitates an understanding of inclusive and effective recordkeeping approaches for appraisal, documentation, preservation, and accessibility of different types of records (such as audio recordings, transcripts, reports, and observatory notes) related to voice-based community engagements. Through qualitative analysis of stakeholder focus group discussions with domestic workers (as marginalized community members) and NGOs working in the sector, we present valuable insights and recommendations for the development of recordkeeping approaches tailored to voice-based remote community engagement records.

Multiple HCI projects have demonstrated the potential of digitally-enhanced, synchronous telephony platforms for use with and by resource-limited communities. However, these platforms were each designed to only facilitate a single archetype of community engagement, limiting their capacity for adaptation when contextual or stakeholder requirements change. This paper builds upon these projects to introduce a design vocabulary, grounded in a formal ontology describing the core components necessary to run adaptable, structured engagements through synchronous group telephony. Through a series of scenarios, we present how this design vocabulary can be used to: help design and communicate different models of synchronous audio engagements, describe existing technologies, and highlight other novel ways in which such platforms could be used. We discuss how while under-explored to this point, synchronous telephony platforms can be designed to orchestrate stakeholder engagements with a degree of flexibility previously impossible in remote, offline contexts.

International program development is a complex process involving many stakeholders. Current international practice affords limited, if any, opportunities for direct community-led input into the program commissioning process, resulting in programs that may not meet the specific needs of communities on the ground. Community voice is one source of data that could help focus the design of effective development programs and interventions. However, development programs are primarily formulated based on representative and often quantitative data conducted by experts from outside the community. Through a participatory video production process with disadvantaged women farmers in rural Bangladesh, we explore the opportunities for including meaningful community voices in these institutionalized processes. We present practical design implications for how community-generated voices can act as rich data, establishing confidence, community bonds and senses of accountability to inform early stages of project development, and to specifically augment and contextualize other data sources.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

While information and communication technology for development (ICTD) researchers have prioritized advocating for community voices in innovation design and development, we have limited insights into how community voices are incorporated by the high-level decision-makers who fund and initiate development projects and programs in the Global South. Indeed, understanding local communities’ voices (expressions of needs, challenges, and priorities) in tailoring effective development projects for sustainable development is widely considered an unmet goal. Using a qualitative survey of eight decision-makers (including grantmaking donors, central governments and INGOs) we explored a number of key factors, including national and global political climates, insider-outsider interactions, and evidence-based approaches that influence the high-level decision making process, workflows, and perceptions of community voice in project commissioning within Bangladesh’s public health nutrition development arena. Our findings reveal the tensions that arise among high-level decision-makers, and highlight the challenges associated with connecting with communities during development project design and implementation. We suggest broader implications and design opportunities for inventive project commissioning approaches to bridge the gap between communities and decision-makers. Our findings are of potential value for ICTD and HCI4D researchers interested in sustainable innovation and understanding and participating in the complex workflows of the project commissioning process in sustainable global development.

One of the ultimate goals of several learning analytics (LA) initiatives is to close the loop and support students’ and teachers’ reflective practices. Although there has been a proliferation of end-user interfaces (often in the form of dashboards), various limitations have already been identified in the literature such as key stakeholders not being involved in their design, little or no account for sense-making needs, and unclear effects on teaching and learning. There has been a recent call for human-centred design practices to create LA interfaces in close collaboration with educational stakeholders to consider the learning design, and their authentic needs and pedagogical intentions. This paper addresses the call by proposing a question-driven LA design approach to ensure that end-user LA interfaces explicitly address teachers’ questions. We illustrate the approach in the context of synchronous online activities, orchestrated by pairs of teachers using audio-visual and text-based tools (namely Zoom and Google Docs). This study led to the design and deployment of an open-source monitoring tool to be used in real-time by teachers when students work collaboratively in breakout rooms, and across learning spaces.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of schools forced families across the globe to transition to school at home. This unprecedented context is likely to have a lasting impact on the practice of schooling and the role of online, digital platforms within school contexts. In this paper we present a contextual inquiry of an ‘emergency home school context’, detailing how nine young families in Melbourne, Australia adapted to the unexpected introduction of school to the home following the government-directed closure of schools. Through an online interview and photo-journal study, we develop an emplaced understanding of the context detailing how the relations between people and places around the home evolved over time. We present five design considerations for digital platforms to support the emergency home school context, placing focus on the fluid roles, relationships and evolving sense of place.

One of the ultimate goals of several learning analytics (LA) initiatives is to close the loop and support students' and teachers' reflective practices. Although there has been a proliferation of end-user interfaces (often in the form of dashboards), various limitations have already been identified in the literature such as little account for sensemaking needs. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a question-driven LA design approach to ensure that end-user LA interfaces explicitly address teachers' questions. We illustrate this in the context of synchronous online activities orchestrated by pairs of teachers using audio-visual and text-based tools (Zoom and Google Docs). This led to the design of an open-source monitoring tool to be used in real-time by teachers when students work collaboratively in breakout rooms, and across learning spaces.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the adoption of teleconferencing systems such as Zoom for remote teaching and working. Although designed primarily for traditional video conferencing scenarios, these platforms are actually being deployed in many diverse contexts. As such, Zoom offers little to aid hosts' understanding of attendee participation and often hinders participant agency. We introduce ZoomSense : an open-source, scalable infrastructure built upon 'virtual meeting participants', which exposes real-time meta-data, meeting content and host controls through an easy to use abstraction - so that developers can rapidly and sustainably augment Zoom.

Community engagements are qualitative processes that make use of participants local knowledge for democratic decision-making, but often exclude participants from data analysis and dissemination. This can mean that they are left feeling that their voice is not properly represented in the final output. This paper presents a digital community engagement process, TalkFutures, that actively involves participants in the production, distributed analysis and summarization of qualitative data. The design of TalkFutures was explored through a five-week deployment with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as part of a consultation designed to inform future strategy. Our analysis of deployment metrics and post-deployment interviews outline how TalkFutures: (i) increased modes of participation across the qualitative workflow; (ii) reduced barriers to participation; and (iii) improved representation in the engagement processes.

Little research has explored how mobile-learning technologies could be used by students to produce interactive artefacts during project-based learning processes. Following a design-based approach, we report on engagements spanning classroom and outdoor learning with students (ages 6-13) and teachers from three different UK schools and a summer school of Travelling Showchildren. Working within the time constraints of each context, we deployed a variety of configurations of a project-based mobile learning (PBML) framework intended to support the production of student-designed mobile-learning activities. We contribute insights gained from these engagements, including how mobile technologies can harness students' existing desire for independence and how they can be configured to leverage the physical and social attributes of place and community as learning resources. We argue for further exploration of the potential roles for mobile technologies within project-based learning, and contribute our PBML framework with recommendations for its re-configuration in response to contextual constraints.

Stammering is a speech disorder affecting approximately 1% of the worldwide population. It can have associated impacts on daily life, such as loss of confidence in social situations and increased anxiety levels (particularly when speaking to strangers). Work exploring the development of digital tools to support people who stammer (PwS) is emerging. However, there is a paucity of research engaging PwS in the design process, with participation being facilitated mainly in testing phases. In this paper, we describe the user-centered design, development and evaluation of StammerApp, a mobile application to support PwS. We contribute insights into the challenges and barriers that PwS experience day-to-day and reflect on the complexities of designing with this diverse group. Finally, we present a set of design recommendations for the development of tools to support PwS in their everyday interactions, and provide an example of how these might be envisioned through the StammerApp prototype.

The potential for mobile technology to support bespoke learning activities seamlessly across learning contexts has not been fully realized. We contribute insights gained from four months of field studies of place-based mobile learning in two different contexts: formal education with a primary school and informal, community-led learning with volunteers in a nearby park. For these studies we introduced ParkLearn: a platform for creating, sharing and engaging with place-based mobile learning activities through seamless learning experiences. The platform enables the creation of easily configurable learning activities that leverage the targeted learning environment and mobile devices' hardware to support situated learning. Learners' uploaded responses to activities can be viewed and shared via a website, supporting seamless follow-up classroom activities. By supporting creativity and independence for both learners and activity designers, ParkLearn promoted a sense of ownership, increased engagement in follow-up activities and supported the leveraging of physical and social communal learning resources.

We present Speeching, a mobile application that uses crowdsourcing to support the self-monitoring and management of speech and voice issues for people with Parkinson's (PwP). The application allows participants to audio record short voice tasks, which are then rated and assessed by crowd workers. Speeching then feeds these results back to provide users with examples of how they were perceived by listeners unconnected to them (thus not used to their speech patterns). We conducted our study in two phases. First we assessed the feasibility of utilising the crowd to provide ratings of speech and voice that are comparable to those of experts. We then conducted a trial to evaluate how the provision of feedback, using Speeching, was valued by PwP. Our study highlights how applications like Speeching open up new opportunities for self-monitoring in digital health and wellbeing, and provide a means for those without regular access to clinical assessment services to practice and get meaningful feedback on their speech.