HCI in Africa is growing yet fragmented and underrepresented globally. We map 2002–2024 activity via a bibliometric scan of 500+ papers ( 300 venues) and an institutional survey in 11 countries, situating results by population, connectivity, and policy readiness, and including work outside HCI labels (e.g., NGOs, tech hubs). We find a post-2020 rise in Africa-led publications and sharper venue stratification: mainstream venues feature mixed teams, while local outlets host much Africa-centered work; teaching shows strong pockets amid capacity, resource, and curriculum constraints. We contribute (1) a continent-scale, context-aware map of authorship and venues; (2) design provocations beyond expansionist logics; and (3) actionable steps for reviewers, venues, and institutions, supported by an open corpus and interactive dashboard.

Usability is the key to making future technology useful to the world, yet it is often ignored. This workshop will introduce Usability, and brainstorm ways to incorporate it into UN SDGs. One example is our effort to add World Usability Day (WUD) to the UN calendar. We will explore implications for technology design for the Global South. We will also identify concrete next steps that we all can take to advance Usability worldwide.

Abstract The preponderance of Western methods, practices, standards, and classifications in the manner in which new technology-related knowledge is created and globalised has led to calls for more inclusive approaches to design. A decolonisation project is concerned with how researchers might contribute to dismantling and re-envisioning existing power relations, resisting past biases, and balancing Western heavy influences in technology design by foregrounding the authentic voices of the indigenous people in the entire design process. We examine how the establishment of local Global South HCI communities (AfriCHI and ArabHCI) has led to the enactment of decolonisation practices. Specifically, we seek to uncover how decolonisation is perceived in the AfriCHI and ArabHCI communities as well as the extent to which both communities are engaged with the idea of decolonisation without necessarily using the term. We drew from the relevant literature, our own outsider/insider lived experiences, and the communities’ responses to an online anonymised survey to highlight three problematic but interrelated practical paradoxes: a terminology, an ethical, and a micro-colonisation paradox. We argue that these paradoxes expose the dilemmas faced by local non-Western researchers as they pursue decolonisation thinking. This article offers a blended perspective on the decolonisation debate in HCI, CSCW, and the practice-based CSCW scholarly communities and invites researchers to examine their research work using a decolonisation lens.

We critically engage with CHI communities emerging outside the global North (ArabHCI and AfriCHI) to explore how participation is configured and enacted within socio-cultural and political contexts fundamentally different from Western societies. We contribute to recent discussions about postcolonialism and decolonization of HCI by focusing on non-Western future technology designers. Our lens was a course designed to engage Egyptian students with a local yet culturally-distant community to design applications for documenting intangible heritage. Through an action research, the instructors reflect on selected students' activities. Despite deploying a flexible learning curriculum that encourages greater autonomy, the students perceived themselves with less agency than other institutional stakeholders involved in the project. Further, some of them struggled to empathize with the community as the impact of the cultural differences on configuring participation was profound. We discuss the implications of the findings on HCI education and in international cross-cultural design projects.

Merging gaming in education produces sweet results for both the students and the teachers. Children nowadays tend to use mobile devices for a big amount of time and don't tend to do physical activities. Interactive floors urge the students to move while learning. Nonetheless, most floor designs require expensive or extensive setup to operate. We present the design and implementation of a prototype of an educational interactive floor utilizing only printed sheets of paper and an android phone. The design is optimized towards minimalism. Which makes it usable, affordable and in budget for students in poor areas. We tested the application in the lab and responses level were satisfactory. However, this is still a work in progress project. Involving students in future experiments is a must.

Colorimetric analysis is a method of determining the concentration of a chemical element or chemical compound in a solution with the aid of a color reagent. This poster explores the utilization of smartphones for colorimetric quantification of biological macromolecules. A low-cost optomechanical device and an Android application were designed to capture the image of a substance sample, and detect its concentration using the Saturation channel from the HSV color space. We report the device design and findings from preliminary experiments.

The Egyptian education system faces urgent challenges. Proposed governmental reforms tend to focus on increasing access to physical and digital resources. There is insufficient understanding as to how the provided resources are currently used in rural areas. We explored the extent to which digital technology could motivate primary students to collaboratively learn a challenging topic in the National Mathematics Curriculum. We designed and researched a digital game to support memorizing multiplication facts. We used an incentive structure that encouraged individual learning with rewarding teamwork. The game was tested with mixed ability and gender groups of students using the Teams-Game-Tournament collaboration technique. A key outcome was that the students with educationally disadvantaged backgrounds benefited from using the game format. They devised their own play and study strategies. We discuss implications on future designs of the game, and considerations for its integration in Egyptian schools.

Social traps are examples of social dilemma situations, where an individual acts for personal advantage that is damaging the group as a whole. Traps can be avoided, nevertheless, by the proper coordination between the group members. A laboratory analog of social traps was implemented by Brechner in the 1970's. We built a Second Life analog for Brechner's experiment to explore how coordination takes place in a 3D virtual world. We observed group response patterns that are very similar to the original experiment. That, in turn, shows a great potential for using virtual worlds as collaborative tools.

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are distributed 3D simulations shared among geographically dispersed users. Adaptive resource allocation is a key issue in NVEs, since user interactions affect system resources which in turn affect the user's experience. Such interplay between the users and the system can be modeled using game theory. Game theory is an analytical tool that studies decision-making between interacting agents (players), where player decisions impact greatly other players. We propose a basic structure for a Game Theory model that describes the interaction between the users and the system in NVEs based on an exploratory study of mobile virtual environments.

Association rules discovery is an important data mining technique which usually produces large number of rules. Subset and superset queries are common queries for association rules. We introduce a new index structure (SSST) for querying association rules, based on a unique set representation using a hierarchical structure. It supports both Subset and Superset queries. Further, it is scalable and adapts to different types of data. The performance of SSST is evaluated using real as well as synthetic datasets, spanning dense and sparse data. The experiments showed that the proposed structure outperforms other set indexing techniques significantly, especially for dense datasets. Also, it scales well with both the number of association rules and the query size.

Navigation is playing an increasingly important role in virtual environments (VE). Today virtual worlds are very large and present challenging navigation tasks. Usually a VE contains few visual details and hence few landmarks to support navigation. In this paper, we propose a technique to automatic identify landmarks in large virtual environment using spatial data mining techniques. Identified landmarks are used to enrich landmark knowledge which is essential for navigation in VE. Initially three datasets with different number of objects have been generated based on a realistic distribution of buildings on one of newest and well designed Egyptian cities. A new model for extracting landmarks in VE was developed based on the models used in real environment. The proposed technique was applied on the generated cities and successfully identified the landmarks.