Domestic environments remain a topic of interest in HCI/Ubicomp, including how Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) can be designed to support sustainable practices in them. In this paper, we broaden the community's knowledge of these topics by studying them in rural Kenya. Specifically, we explore users' experiences with 'M-Kopa Solar', a commercially-available solar-powered lighting system for homes. We draw from our fieldwork, which primarily involved conducting interviews and observations at 21 households. In the process of learning about people's experiences with M-Kopa, we also learned about other sustainable practices that were central to their everyday lives. Our findings suggest that M-Kopa is a "green" solution to limited access to electricity in rural Kenya; in particular, we find that the system's design contributes to its success. These findings also raise questions about the long-term implications of such systems---especially in terms of how M-Kopa's marketing practices introduce people to consumption practices. We discuss this and other findings; in particular, the continued significance of "defamiliarization" as design strategy within HCI/ubicomp.

Substantial interest is focused on using video to disseminate agricultural information to rural farmers in the developing world. This paper explores the effectiveness of using this approach to improve rural farmers' device literacy---that is, their ability to use mobile phones for purposes other than making and receiving voice calls. Findings from our pilot evaluation, conducted with women farmers in rural western Kenya, suggest that videos combined with facilitators can be useful for improving women's confidence in sending text messages, using 'm-agriculture' applications, unsubscribing from services that deduct their mobile phone airtime, and, in general, increasing their awareness of the mobile Internet and its related services (i.e., Facebook and Google). More significantly, our findings also reveal underexplored issues that hinder women's mobile phone use: in particular, their concerns about losing money to Safaricom (Kenya's dominant mobile network provider), and the challenges that result from a wide variety of mobile phone screen interfaces. These findings encourage ICTD researchers and practitioners to pay greater attention to corporate power structures affecting mobile phone use, to recognize that rural farmers' information needs encompass more than just agricultural material, and to raise questions about scalability of instructional video.

This article provides a detailed analysis of rural Kenyan women and their interactions with the products and services of Safaricom Ltd., Kenya's dominant mobile network provider. The amplification theory of technology offers a framework for analyzing our data, and we find that differential motivation and capacity are mechanisms that appear to benefit the network provider, while disadvantaging rural mobile phone owners. In particular, the design of Safaricom's airtime scratch cards and mobile services does not support rural users’ capabilities. Our analysis suggests that technologists consider their ongoing responsibilities for technologies they built yesterday—that is, they should address problems inherent in the current design of mobile-phone interfaces. We offer practical recommendations on how to do this, and ask HCI/ICTD researchers and practitioners to more carefully consider how overlooking corporate power structures and their impact on mobile phone use amplifies social inequality.

This article focuses on "fundi wa simu," (mobile phone repairers) in rural Kenya and their ideas about mobile phone design. Our study design and analysis were guided by ideas from postcolonial computing; we use our qualitative findings, and outcomes from a drawing exercise, to show existing flaws in mobile phone design, and to explore how repairers' knowledge can lead to handsets that are better suited for rural Kenyans. Our argument is that, by engaging with repairers "[on] their own terms," technologists can expand conversations around designing for the 'developing' world that go beyond building novel smartphone applications. In fact, such conversations can also include reimagining mobile phones, and supporting local repairers' efforts to manufacture them. We conclude by discussing ways to improve upon postcolonial approaches to technology design.