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.

We contrast assumptions embedded in AI/ML systems to patterns of repetition in discussions about weather-related risks amongst members of remote First Nations communities. Natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly proposed for use in emergency management. Thus, we analysed how repetition worked as a collaborative practice when participants in First Nations-led workshops in Australia’s Northern Territory talked about planning, responding to, and recovering from cyclones, floods and other extreme weather. Repetition supported shared understanding between languages, reinforced relational accountability, and sustained attention to unresolved issues. Yet, AI systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) treat repetition as redundancy through dataset deduplication, alignment and preference optimisation, summarisation and compression. This can amplify extant patterns of non-listening in colonial institutions that require First Nations communities to bear the burden of ‘repetitive epistemic labour’ [29] and restate their concerns and knowledge. We conclude that sensitivity to how repetition can suppress meaning is essential in AI/ML design and engineering, especially for intercultural settings where communication is simultaneously informational, relational, and accountable.

Amidst escalating global concern about the intensification of bushfire (wildfire), we investigate how interactive, data-driven articles shape people’s engagement with this expanding environmental crisis. We build on critical discourse that positions climate informatics products as sociopolitical actors, as well as research on polarisation in environmental communication, through an empirical study of bushfire news coverage and its reception by urban Australians. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 7 fire science experts and 12 city-dwellers, who engaged with three interactive news articles. Our analysis highlights the challenges of navigating uncertainty, polarised and shifting discourse, and the emotional burden of bushfire communication. We show that engagement is shaped by a dynamic interplay between affective and cognitive sense-making, which can both motivate and inhibit attention. Participants expressed a desire for actionable, place-relevant information, yet often encountered barriers in interpreting complex or ambiguous visualisations. Based on these findings, we identify design opportunities for interactive articles that (1) respond to audiences’ existing exposure to environmental discourse, (2) scaffold engagement with uncertainty, (3) connect audiences with distant people and places, and (4) support pathways to collective action.

Community Networks (CNs) worldwide are promising low-resource communities new ways of connecting and interplaying with technology. The embedded infrastructures of the CNs are derived from the sociocultural, political, spatial, and economic practices of the people they are built with and the communities they are located in. CNs situated in an area are not only followed by the technical requirements and possibilities of making the networks alive and accessible but are also shaped and moulded by the people and their practices. Community members’ lived experience and awareness of the local knowledge and local practices materialize the network in the situated realities. Yet the knowledge and experiences of the communities are often invisible and not considered in future research agendas for infrastructure and technology developments. In this workshop, we aim to bring together community members from around the world working on the frontlines of CNs as experts to share their local knowledge and experiences of designing, developing, negotiating, and maintaining the network, while opening the space for early career researchers and students to listen and learn from the ground.

The field of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classification, is conscious of structural factors that influence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power differentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness.

Recent HCI scholarship has critiqued anthropocentrism in design as contributing to the ecological crisis. The current paper contributes theoretically and empirically to this area, adopting the lens of Socio-Ecological Relations, inspired by Environmental History and STS. We argue that a socio-ecological lens can offer practical tools to HCI and Interaction Design to overcome the separation between humanity and nature-as-a-resource. For this reason, our unit of analysis is humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, and we show how this double internality becomes visible using an historical and geographical approach in the design process. Methodologically, using Situational Analysis, we analyse an Action Research project that introduced a digital platform for community radio in rural contexts. We find that Socio-Ecological Relations, performed in specific places, shape the design process and are themselves transformed by becoming part of it. We provide a set of sensitivities for operationalizing this approach for design researchers.

Smart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialled it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.

Licencing frameworks are embedded with sociotechnical imaginaries that limit the potential for networked technologies to make traditional media forms, like radio, more inclusive. We sought to refine and extend a platform, RootIO, which aims to enable diverse people to run small radio stations by using internet and mobile networks that avoid the costs of studios and specialist equipment. We situated design and refinement in the activities of groups that set up and ran four community stations in rural Romania and some Irish islands over three-years and found national regulations limited who articulated requirements. Activities in applying for, and complying with, licences shaped design priorities, embedded temporal demands, certain organisational structures and division of responsibilities, and assumptions about studios and professionalism. Indeed, small radio stations are subject to the same values as large media corporations that pursue market power. Regulatory frameworks are specific to nations and media form, yet our analysis illustrates that they impede designing platforms to widen inclusion by enacting broader sociotechnical imaginaries. We hope this reflection provokes discussion, in HCI and CSCW, about our responsibilities in engaging with the policies that shape possible futures.

Shared use of small-scale natural commons is vital to the livelihoods of billions of rural inhabitants, particularly women, and advocates propose that local telecommunications systems that are oriented by the commons can close rural connectivity gaps. This article extends insights about women's exclusion from such Community Networks (CNs) by considering ‘commoning’, or practices that produce, reproduce and use the commons and create communality. I generated data in interviews and observations of rural CNs in seven countries in the Global South and in multi-sited ethnography of international advocacy for CNs. Male biases in technoculture and rural governance limit women's participation in CNs, and women adopt different approaches to performing their communal identity while using technology. This situation contributes to detaching CNs from relations that are produced in women's commoning. It also illustrates processes that co-opt the commons in rural technology endeavours and the diverse ways commoners express their subjectivities in response.

This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities.

Increased advocacy and support for Community networks (CNs), or locally owned and/or operated telecommunications, reflects hopes that CNs will compensate for telecom companies' failure to serve rural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). My study of six cases in Africa, Asia and Latin America responds to this political project. Rural populations in LMICs often comprise more women, and increasingly, older women; rural governance and the technoculture of CNs, however, have masculine biases. Discussions, interviews and observations involving 152 women and 172 men champions, operators, users and non-users showed that women are less likely than men to use CN services and be paid for their labour in CNs. Women manage their personal aspirations, identities and expectations about their labour in various ways, and younger women seek alternatives to connect, sometimes setting up independent enterprises. Thus, maintaining the commons ethos that sustains CNs requires attending to different women's approaches.

In this paper, we examine how two chat apps fit into the communication ecosystem of six large distributed enterprises, in India and Kenya. From the perspective of management, these chat apps promised to foster greater communication and awareness between workers in the field, and between fieldworkers and the enterprises administration and management centres. Each organisation had multiple different types of chat groups, characterised by the types of content and interaction patterns they mediate, and the different organisational functions they fulfil. Examining the interplay between chat and existing local practices for coordination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we discuss how chat manifests in the distributed workplace and how it fits -- or otherwise -- alongside the rhythms of both local and remote work. We contribute to understandings of chat apps for workplace communication and provide insights for shaping their ongoing development.

Being in nature is typically regarded to be calming, relaxing and purifying. When in nature, people often seek to be mobile through physical activity such as hiking. But also, nature provides an opportunity for meditative, mindful or inspiring experiences remote from urban everyday life. Mobile Technologies such as sports tracking technologies, electronic tourist guides, mobile phone integrated cameras and omnipresent social media access, have potential to both enhance and disrupt a user's interaction with and experience of nature. This MobileHCI workshop follows on from the first successful NatureCHI workshop by focusing on the challenges associated with the design of mobile technologies that support unobtrusive interaction in nature.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on peer-to-peer (P2P) applications through an ethnographic study of auto-rickshaw drivers in Bengaluru, India. We describe how the adoption of a P2P application, Ola, which connects passengers to rickshaws, changes drivers work practices. Ola is part of the 'peer services' phenomenon which enable new types of ad-hoc trade in labour, skills and goods. Auto-rickshaw drivers present an interesting case because prior to Ola few had used Smartphones or the Internet. Furthermore, as financially vulnerable workers in the informal sector, concerns about driver welfare become prominent. Whilst technologies may promise to improve livelihoods, they do not necessarily deliver [57]. We describe how Ola does little to change the uncertainty which characterizes an auto drivers' day. This leads us to consider how a more equitable and inclusive system might be designed.

Current human–computer interaction (HCI) paradigms are deeply rooted in a Western epistemology that attests its partiality and bias of its embedded assumptions, values, definitions, techniques, and derived frameworks and models. Thus tensions created between local cultures and HCI principles require researchers to pursue a more critical research agenda within an indigenous epistemology. In this article an Afro-centric paradigm is presented, as promoted by African scholars, as an alternative perspective to guide interaction design in a situated context in Africa and promote the reframing of HCI. A practical realization of this paradigm shift within our own community-driven design in Southern Africa is illustrated.

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.

We reflect on activities to design a mobile application to enable rural people in South Africa's Eastern Cape to record and share their stories, which have implications for 'cross-cultural design,' and the wider use of stories in design. We based our initial concept for generating stories with audio and photos on cell-phones on a scenario informed by abstracting from digital storytelling projects globally and our personal experience. But insights from ethnography, and technology experiments involving storytelling, in a rural village led us to query our grounding assumptions and usability criteria. So, we implemented a method using cell-phones to localise storytelling, involve rural users and probe ways to incorporate visual and audio media. Products from this method helped us to generate design ideas for our current prototype which offers great flexibility. Thus we present a new way to depict stories digitally and a process for improving such software.

We describe and reflect on a method we used to evaluate usability and give insights on situated use of a mobile digital storytelling prototype. We report on rich data we gained by implementing this method and argue that we were able to learn more about our prototype, users, their needs, and their context, than we would have through other evaluation methods. We look at the usability problems we uncovered and discuss how our flexibility in field-testing allowed us to observe unanticipated usage, from which we were able to motivate future design directions. Finally, we reflect on the importance of spending time in-situ during all stages of design, especially when designing across cultures.

We propose that grounding documentaries can help designers to respond to non-western, non-urban spatial infrastructures. We describe locally-produced, in vivo video methods developed by indigenous Elders in Australia to persist and transfer their Traditional Knowledge and the specific use-case of a documentary on fire. The culturally-situated nature of the documentary exposes subtleties in a dialectic between models of space. The ontology embedded in the methods, and expressed by the documentary, has a spatiality and a belonging to place that profoundly differs from that typifying HCI's urban focus and many video methods used by designers to understand useage contexts. Grass-roots driven documentaries ground subsequent design by engaging designers in otherwise inaccessible truths about remote places, partly through the designer's sense of their own felt-life. The fire documentary reveals many general insights for design, such as the need to escape a singularly anthropocentric spatio-temporal approach in order to respond to the plurality of user experience.