Compensation in HCI research is often the primary ethical interface between HCI researchers and low-income communities. Yet, prevailing models of compensation can perpetuate neocolonial extraction and frame participation as transactional labor. This practice risks creating dependency and obscuring power imbalances, ultimately compromising both research integrity and participant dignity. Drawing on the experiences of researchers working in Africa and the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu, this paper employs a decolonial lens to critique the research economy of participation and compensation. We propose a framework for relational compensation, which re-imagines compensation not as payment for data but as a form of restorative justice and relational accountability. Through analytic vignettes, we examine tensions around community-researcher interdependency, gendered care burdens, and community solidarity. We conclude with principles for relational research economies that prioritize communal benefit, long-term data sovereignty, and co-designed terms of engagement, offering HCI a path toward reciprocal praxis.

Wearable technologies for children are becoming increasingly widespread, yet many are designed around Western assumptions of materiality, aesthetics, and representation. This raises important questions about how such systems are interpreted in contexts where clothing, materials, and visual symbols carry strong cultural meaning. In settings such as South Africa and Namibia, garments are closely tied to identity, tradition, and social values, making standard Western-oriented designs potentially misaligned with local practices. This Work-in-Progress paper presents early findings from the MoveWithMe project, a wearable movement-based system co-designed with mothers in South Africa and later introduced into a rural Namibian setting. The system consists of a sensor-embedded cape and a companion mobile application featuring animated child and animal characters designed to support engagement through storytelling. To explore how the system may be reinterpreted across cultural contexts, it was introduced in Namibia as a design probe within a community workshop. Participants explored and wore the cape and interacted with the mobile application, sharing open-ended feedback on both the physical and digital components. Findings show that participants moved beyond functionality and focused on cultural expression. They suggested alternative materials such as animal skins, traditional beadwork, and redesigned characters reflecting local clothing and familiar animals. These responses highlight how both the garment and digital media are understood as culturally situated artefacts. This paper provides early insights into how interactive media systems can be reshaped through culturally grounded, community-led processes, contributing to understanding the social and cultural implications of media technologies in diverse contexts.

Abstract Technological artifacts designed by individuals from developing nations often do not flourish in developing regions. Many authors conducting work in these regions have therefore called on researchers to make use of co-design in order to mitigate power imbalances, include the voices of communities in the design of technology intended for them, and design and build more contextually situated technology. Many of these authors also refer to the need for co-design readiness in their work. However, little is known about how co-design readiness can be articulated and achieved, especially when working with rural communities. In this paper, we make use of qualitative meta-analysis to interrogate the data from three distinct case studies in order to investigate co-design readiness. We found that co-design readiness comprises three forms, namely: (1) emotional readiness built through trust, relationship building, and empathy; (2) cultural readiness, which requires that researchers and participants have an awareness and respect for each other’s cultural values and beliefs; and, finally, (3) readiness in terms of confidence and familiarity with the technologies used which can be achieved through careful and strategic methodological decisions. We found that researchers should explicitly plan for readiness and should not assume that readiness will grow organically and that co-design, if planned well is a lengthy process. Finally, we provide learnings from our work to how co-design readiness can be achieved through planning and methodological decisions.

Message-based health information dissemination systems can potentially improve maternal and child health (MCH). By conveying health information to parents, SMS- and chatbot-based systems can support parents’ learning and empower them to make better health decisions for their children. However, there is limited design advice for creating message-based dissemination systems for MCH. To help address this gap, we conducted 14 participatory workshops with 42 parents from Portugal and South Africa, exploring how parents learned to care for their children’s health. Our findings showed how parents reflected on the health advice they received, by assessing the fit of the advice to their child’s characteristics, their values and beliefs, the advice’s feasibility, or the intention and competence of the advice giver. Based on these insights, we propose four design implications for creating message-based health information dissemination systems tailored to parents and their children.

South Africa is experiencing extreme weather conditions, often resulting in failed crops. The country has many subsistence farmers who rely on small-scale farming for food security and livelihoods. This paper presents [project name omitted to ensure anonymity], an Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) hydroponic grow tent implementing the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) approach for leafy green plant production. The system uses a Random Forest Classifier (RFC) and various sensors for the real-time, accurate management of nutrient levels, pH, light, temperature, and humidity to provide an optimal environment for crop growth, in most cases, regardless of the weather patterns outside of the tent. The system further includes a mobile application that allows farmers to interject and manage all the elements in the tent. This paper reports on the design, development, and first deployment of [project name omitted to ensure anonymity] with rural subsistence farmers in South Africa. We found that South African farmers are keen to explore new agricultural technologies and were able to co-farm using [project name omitted to ensure anonymity] to grow crops that are no longer successfully cultivated due to the erratic weather conditions in South Africa.

Hydroponic farming is a sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture, allowing farmers to grow crops more efficiently. This type of farming involves growing plants in water without needing soil. There is increasing agreement that this agricultural approach should be utilized to mitigate food insecurity, particularly considering the fluctuating and unpredictability of weather conditions. However, this approach requires technical expertise in addition to consistent monitoring. Existing research has focused on applying The Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to the automation and monitoring of hydroponic farming systems. However, limited work tested the viability of these systems in the field with farmers. This study focused on including rural subsistence farmers in farming alongside a seven-month and ongoing deployment of an AI and IoT-enabled hydroponics system following a qualitative approach that entailed focus groups with the farmers and observations of the hydroponic systems. This paper discusses the lessons learned regarding unpredictable and uncontrollable extreme weather conditions, equipment failure, choices in nutrient solutions, and pest infestations, which often all have unplanned and unintended consequences for these systems and farmers. We argue that more deployments are needed to better understand how these systems function in real-world settings.

This paper analyses the suitability of a Fuzzy Logic (FL) AI-trained machine learning model to assist IoT-based smart hydroponics for deployment with South African rural subsistence farmers. To answer these questions, a fuzzy logic model was developed to accurately determine and adjust outputs, based on inputs received from IoT sensors monitoring the nutrient solution and environment conditions in the hydroponics system. We conducted an initial evaluation of the FL-AI, followed by a real-world test based on an existing data set and finally conducted testing on simulated data to ensure that the AI can accurately determine crisp values to pass to a cloud based IoT platform accessed by a micro-controller which adjusts the environment variables of the hydroponics system. This approach was followed to ensure that we respect the time and availability of our research participants. We found that the system was able to accurately determine the necessary crisp values needed by the microcontroller. We further report on the suitability of FL-AI for rural subsistence farmers as the AI is less complex, reduces energy consumption, and resource waste, and the burden of manually monitoring and adjusting hydroponics systems, and is easy to use for first-time growers. We further discuss crucial lessons learned particularly in the South African and other Low to Middle Income Countries (LMIC) context, such as the necessity of solar power-enabled systems and local wifi networks rather than cloud-based IoT platforms.

Especially in developing regions, parents are rarely given a direct voice in the design of digital maternal and child health (MCH) interventions. Instead, MCH needs and requirements are driven by organizations and health workers. In this research, we engage with both rural and urban parents and community leaders to better understand their challenges and priorities for digital MCH and propose a parent-centered agenda for human-computer interaction research. This paper reports on the community-based, digital MCH priorities identified in our research, and describes how we approached community discourse and co-design of digital initiatives for these priorities, through parent-centered workshops with low-resource South African communities. Furthermore, we provide the parent-centered design opportunities and tensions we discovered for digital MCH in South African contexts, such as designing for local contexts and languages, designing for accessibility and connectedness, and highlighting the underdeveloped digital MCH niches. Finally, we highlight the importance of including facilitators for co-design workshops, such as using intermediaries and design cards.

research-article Open AccessPoster: Lessons from Doing Fieldwork with Bandwidth-constrained communities Online Share on Authors: Sarina Till University of Cape Town and Independent Institute of Education, South Africa University of Cape Town and Independent Institute of Education, South AfricaView Profile , Melissa Densmore University of Cape Town, South Africa University of Cape Town, South AfricaView Profile , Toshka Lauren Coleman University of Cape Town, South Africa University of Cape Town, South AfricaView Profile , Nervo Verdezoto Dias Cardiff University, South Africa Cardiff University, South AfricaView Profile Authors Info & Claims COMPASS '21: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable SocietiesJune 2021 Pages 445–448https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471979Online:23 September 2021Publication History 0citation50DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads50Last 12 Months50Last 6 weeks20 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF