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.

This paper describes an initiative for exploring the design space of an enhanced collaboration platform for a multidisciplinary breast cancer team meeting distributed between two hospitals. We present our socio-technical approach to the system design process which is intended to encourage engagement between the research technologists and the clinicians without adversely affecting the work of the clinicians. We report on some initial results of the observational study performed by the Braccetto research team and current social-technical issues affecting communication between the multidisciplinary team members during the meetings. We highlight some technical and research challenges which include the role that medical images play as "boundary objects" for several disciplines in the meeting, the awareness requirement and the evaluation of collaboration effectiveness.