This paper reports on a digital storytelling project which seeks to create interactive storytelling of personal experience narratives. We begin with an ethnographic study of two resident storytellers at the District Six Museum, Cape Town, Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers, who tell audience their personal Apartheid-era narratives. An analysis of their narratives and audience interactions led to the design a digital storytelling prototype in the form of a virtual environment containing two storytellre agents based on Joe and Noor. These agents simulated two interactions: questions in which users could ask the storyteller agents questions; and exchange structures where storyteller agents ask users questions. We evaluated the effectiveness of these in a controlled experiment (n=101) and found that questions led to significant increases in narrative engagement (p=0.05) and interest (p=0.02) while exchange structures significantly improved narrative enjoyment (p=0.004), engagement (p=0.002) and interest (p=0.02).

Within HCI, aging is often viewed in terms of designing assistive technologies to improve the lives of older people, such as those who are suffering from frailty or memory loss. Our research adopts a very different approach, reframing the relationship in terms of wisdom, creativity and invention. We ran a series of workshops where groups of retirees, aged between early 60s and late 80s, used the MaKey MaKey inventor's toolkit. We asked them to think about inventing the future and suggest ideas for new technologies. Our findings showed that they not only rose to the challenge but also mastered the technology, collaborated intensely together while using it and freely and at length discussed their own, their family's and others' relationship with technology. We discuss the value of empowering people in this way and consider what else could be invented to enable more people to be involved in the design and use of creative technologies.

This paper gives an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work we undertook in pursuit of designing co-located interactions. We show how we sensitized ourselves to theory from diverse intellectual disciplines, to develop an analytical lens to better think about co-located interactions. By critiquing current systems and their conceptual foundations, and further interrelating theories particularly in regard to performative aspects of identity and communication, we develop a more nuanced way of thinking about co-located interactions. Drawing on our sensitivities, we show how we generated and are exploring, through the process of design, a set of co-located interactions that are situated within our social ecologies, and contend that our upfront theoretical work enabled us to identify and explore this space in the first place. This highlights the importance of problem framing, especially for projects adopting design methodologies.

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and deployment of a tool developed to help rural health trainers to create digital training content for low-literate Community Health Workers (CHWs) in Lesotho; the digital content being mobile videos created from combining images, voice-over, and/or video clips. Our results show that when health professionals who are based in rural areas were empowered by the tool to create their own content, they were able to supplement nationally and globally produced health training materials with more locally relevant content that addresses unique information needs within their communities. We discuss other lessons learned from an eight-months deployment of this tool in Lesotho, and conclude with recommendations on how a similar project can be implemented in other developing regions.

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.

In this article we describe a novel approach to collaborative video authoring using handheld projectors. PicoTales are created by sketching story elements on a projector+phone prototype, and then animated by moving the projected image. Movements are captured using motion sensor data, rather than visual or other tracking methods, allowing interaction and story creation anywhere. We describe in detail the design and development of our prototype device, and also address issues in position estimation and element tracking. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the prototype, demonstrating its accuracy and usability for ad-hoc creation of story videos. The potential of the system for story authoring is shown via a further experiment looking at the quality of the animated story videos produced. We conclude by considering possible future developments of the concept, and highlighting the benefits of our design for collaborative story capture.

Drinking water quality, in many parts of South Africa, is far below acceptable standards. With a high number of illnesses and deaths in the country due to diarrheal diseases, the impact is critical. This research addresses the challenge of reporting complex and critical water quality information in a way that is accessible to all South Africans. High illiteracy rates, the presence of 11 official languages and limited-to-no access to technology in many areas, present some of the major challenges to the design of an alert notification and reporting system. We describe the design of WATER Alert!, a symbol-based prototype mobile phone application to alert and report water quality information to consumers and allow for citizen involvement in water management. Our findings from a preliminary evaluation revealed that WATER Alert! is simple to use and has a perceived usefulness amongst participants. The findings also suggest that such an application would help to improve consumers' understanding of water quality information leading to an improved Community Perspective on drinking water quality.

In this study, we examine Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) technology interventions that have been developed over the last decade. The purpose is to provide a snapshot of the trends that have characterized ICT4D technology interventions from the period starting 1995 to 2010. This paper presents three general dimensions i.e. ICTs, development and research which are further broken down into seven variables used to categorize projects over this period. The seven variables include: telecommunication, terminal device, target group, domain area, region, research methods and discipline. Results suggest that applied research stood out as the methodology of choice; health and education as the most researched areas; hand-held interventions as the most popular choice of solutions; and Computer Science, Informatics and Information Systems as the disciplines that offer ICT4D technology interventions. Consequently, we argue that these trends will facilitate understanding the past performance of ICT4D, both as an academic field and as an area of development practice, and identify defining ideas on the potential directions for the future.

This paper explores the phone and mobile media sharing relationships of a group of young mobile phone users in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Intensive sharing took place within peer and intimate relationships, while resource sharing characterized relationships with a more extensive circle, including members of the older generation. Phones were kept open to others to avoid inferences of stinginess, disrespect, or secretiveness and the use of privacy features (such as passwords) was complicated by conflicts between an ethos of mutual support and the protection of individual property and privacy. Collocated phone use trumped online sharing but media on phones constituted public personae similar to social media 'profiles'. Proximate sharing within close relationships allowed social display, relationship-building and deference to authority. We suggest changes to current file-based interfaces for Bluetooth pairing, media 'galleries', and peer-to-peer text communication to better support such proximate exchanges of media and messaging.

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 study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Mobile devices with wireless network capabilities can be associated to form ad hoc networks to share resources; however, such an association of devices requires authentication. At present, PIN is the common authentication method, but in many cases, small devices may not have input interfaces to accommodate PIN entry. We therefore design a gesture-based authentication scheme, called GesturePIN, for associating multiple mobile devices; our solution provides the advantage of being adaptable to any PIN authentication systems. We have also conducted a quantitative user study to understand the speed and accuracy of people using our gesture-based system compared to using PIN.

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.

User-centred design (UCD) is a well-accepted and useful design methodology for designing interactive systems. In recent years, developing world researchers have attempted to utilise UCD but with mixed results. The results from two developing world, UCD projects, MuTI Mobile and CyberTracker, have shown that the analysis tools and techniques provided by UCD are useful but difficulties arise when interpreting the analysis findings to produce a requirements specification. In particular, traditional UCD methodologies fail to consider the broader and complex effects of the user's physical and social environments. The field studies also highlighted the limitations of existing early-stage prototyping techniques, such as paper-prototyping. The authors address these issues by presenting several tools and techniques that they feel are more suited to the developing world and essential components of a candidate ‘UCD4Dev’ methodology. These tools and techniques include the use of ‘4Dev’ frameworks, such as the ‘Real Access/Real Impact’ criteria, to highlight pertinent developing world issues, the use of higher fidelity technology artefacts during early stage prototyping, the importance of developing a motivated user group and the need for a progressive participatory design approach.

The paper reports a mobile application that allows users to share photos with other co-present users by synchronizing the display on multiple mobile devices. Various floor control policies (software locks that determine when someone can control the displays) were implemented. The behaviour of groups of users was studied to determine how people would use this application for sharing photos and how various floor control policies affect this behaviour. Explicit policies was shown to be the best strategy for structured presentations, but when all locks were removed, the users created a new form of social interaction which seemed to be a more compelling use of the technology than the original, intended, application.

This paper will describe a novel interaction technique that allows mobile phone users to create and share contextualised media packages between their personal, BlueTooth enabled camera phones, and situated public displays. Unlike other solutions to this problem, the one presented in this paper does not require any specialist software or hardware on the user's handset. We believe this technique has the potential to revolutionise how people donate and retrieve digital media files without incurring any direct cost.

In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation of how people search their photo collections for events (a set of photographs relating to a particular well defined event), singles (individual photographs) and properties (a set of photographs with a common theme) on PDAs. We describe a prototype system that allows us to expose many issues that must be considered when designing photo searching interfaces. We discuss each of these issues and make recommendations where applicable. Our major observation is that several different methods are used to locate photographs. In light of this, we conclude by discussing how photo searching interfaces might embody or support such an approach.

The tutorial explores interesting and empowering mobile design philosophies, principles and methods as well as giving specific guidance on key emerging consumer application areas such as image browsing and information access.

In this paper, we describe a project which uses PDAs to provide an interactive experience with a virtual environment. In particular, we focus on the navigational aspects of allowing the users to move through, and view, the environment. As this system will be deployed in a museum, it was crucial that the navigation be as intuitive as possible. To that end, we developed and evaluated two prototypes: one was based purely on gesture, whilst the other used a combination of gesture and keypad. For the purposes of our application, the combination of keypad and gesture provided the most effective.

Some multimedia archives contain data which have vague locations in time and space. By this we mean that, although there is some idea of when and where the entity is located, the precise information is unknown. In this paper, we present a novel approach to displaying and querying such uncertain data. We use the concepts of dynamic queries, add to this a 2D query tool for performing spatial queries and enable Boolean combinations of queries. We have implemented these ideas in a pilot system for querying African artwork. In this way, we show how it is possible for novice users to easily query large multimedia archives with complex uncertain attributes.

Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and --- more constructively --- suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services. Key words: Mobile internet, HCI, Usability, WAP. 1.