Technologies that facilitate communication between older adults and those around them have the potential to strengthen older adults' connections with their support network. In this paper, we present findings from interviews with 16 older adult participants in the United States about their social network composition and related technology use during a challenging life event, the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a decrease of in-person meetings and increase in communication technology adoption. Using the convoy model of social relations, we sought to better understand the roles different technologies play in older adults' social connections. Participants chose what communication tools to use depending on social and situational contexts and overcame accessibility issues to adopt new technologies that supported continued engagement with their support networks. However, when others positioned technologies as ways for the older adults to receive social support, they resisted. A more comprehensive view of older adults' evolving social convoys can help designers and researchers better create technologies that help expand and maintain older adults' social support networks. Further, to facilitate older adults' social connectivity, the design of technology should encourage older adults' support networks to see those older adults as support providers, not just potential support recipients.

Historically, crafts have been associated with women’s small-scale creative production in the home, equated with hobbies or amateur production, and devalued in comparison to both art and industrial production. During its early years, Etsy was seen as a champion of “handmade”, bringing visibility to crafts and providing economic value. This paper presents results of a qualitative study with 18 small online sellers of Etsy platform. Our study shows that Etsy’s sociotechnical design results in a high burden of invisible labor for sellers, including categories of labor not replicated by other online platforms. These new categories include negotiation and articulation work around defining and defending “handmade” products, understanding one’s intellectual property and how (and whether) to defend that IP elsewhere on the platform, understanding working of platform algorithms and adapting to changing platform regulations. Our findings provide new ways to frame the challenges faced by producers/sellers on emerging marketplace platforms.

We describe how current radiological best practices are predicated on a sophisticated technological ecosystem usually comprised of multiple large-scale displays, and integrated record keeping and communication systems driven by high-speed networks. At the same time, current development of low-cost ultrasound (U/S) devices for low-resource settings trends towards small-scale, independent devices with palm-sized screens. We reviewed existing literature, analyzed findings from two years of fieldwork in Uganda, and conducted an interview study with clinicians about radiology work practices to determine which patterns and technologies contribute to the efficacy of ultrasound. We use these findings to inform how ultrasound technology in low-resource settings can most usefully be developed and deployed. In addition, findings are relevant for creating medical technologies for low-resource environments generally, as we make clear the importance of considering not just technology development aspects like power consumption and interface, but also larger technology and work ecosystems.

In this paper we describe three different offerings of a multi-quarter multidisciplinary capstone experience where students engaged in designing and building technology to address problems faced by populations in local and remote resource-constrained environments. We define resource-constrained environments broadly (e.g., low-income communities, low bandwidth environments). These environments provide unique constraints (e.g., cultures where people are unfamiliar with or afraid of technology, environments where power and network connectivity are scarce and expensive). Students are partnered with organizations interested in piloting a solution they devise. The course brings together multidisciplinary teams of students to conduct fieldwork with potential user populations, design a technology to solve a problem inspired by a community-based organization, implement a solution, and evaluate that solution. Students work on projects with real-world impact and gain valuable experience with multidisciplinary design and multidisciplinary team work. In this paper we describe the three class formats we have attempted, sample student projects, and course outcomes based on student projects and survey responses. We also address the various ways projects have continued past the course, and we analyze the structural course and project elements that have contributed to student and research successes.

Ultrasound imaging is an effective tool for identifying maternal mortality risk factors. However, the high cost of ultrasound devices and the scarcity of ultrasound training are two major barriers to adoption in the developing world; complicated and expensive medical technologies are unlikely to meet the needs of users with limited opportunities for formal training and continuing education. To address these particular barriers, we have designed an inexpensive ultrasound system composed of off-the-shelf hardware and custom software. Our system is designed for use by rural midwives---often central medical figures in resource-constrained communities. This paper presents our work integrating help and tutorial software into the ultrasound system we developed. Our goal is to supplement a midwife's conceptual and operational knowledge of diagnostic ultrasound through appropriate and adaptive scaffolding. The design of our help system is informed by interviews with sonographers and radiologists in the United States and Uganda, and data collected during two fieldwork visits to Uganda. Through our fieldwork and preliminary evaluations, we have found that in addition to in-context reference material accessible during an exam, midwives need in-depth learning materials that can be accessed outside of a medical exam scenario.

In this paper, we present two similar projects in which we were concerned with describing end users from a developing region to designers, developers and other stakeholders that were not from the developing region. In one project, we described mobile device users from Kyrgyzstan and in the other we described potential users of home water treatment and storage devices from the Andhra Pradesh region of India. For both projects, we used presentations and analysis methods that were inspired by 'personas' used in human-computer interaction (HCI). An HCI persona is an archetypal character that represents a group of users who share common goals, attitudes, and behaviors when interacting with a product. We found personas were an effective way to organize and communicate survey data; however, in both projects we had to modify the persona method from how it is usually presented in the HCI literature. We believe that our persona creation methods can act as a model for other ICTD researchers when describing their targeted end users.

Traditional usability methods are of limited use when evaluating systems designed for distant, diverse populations. In this paper, we describe a study conducted in two Ghanaian villages that evaluated an audio computer designed for people living in oral cultures. Informed by ICTD and orality-grounded HCID, we modified existing usability testing practices and we reflect on the utility of these adaptations. We found that conducting a culturally appropriate study often meant forgoing more traditional approaches in favor of flexible, opportunistic methods. We acknowledge the challenges of adapting traditional usability methods for oral, rural users. However, we found that by implementing strategic modifications led by local staff, our study produced valuable, actionable results.

We present our experiences with an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. The aim is to permit the development of information services that do not rely on a central authority or complex web hosting. We developed and applied our system to the network of privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation systems in the developing world. A custom designed GPS-GSM unit is placed on a vehicle, and users can query our server over SMS with their own non-GPS-enabled cell phones. We report on the accuracy of our location naming approach and estimates of bus arrival times. In addition, we summarize interviews with bus drivers and bus riders relating their views of the system and outline directions for future work. Our system is a grassroots solution to the persistent lack of transport information in developing countries.

Understanding contextual variance of the social meaning of ICTs for development is essential; technology is much more likely to substantively contribute to development if we understand how technologies are likely to diffuse and be adopted -- and those patterns of diffusion and usage hinge on the social meaning of those technologies and how they inhabit a larger technological ecology. In this article we focus on the Internet as a series of technologies with widely varying meanings for users around the globe. We have found that while people who use the Internet tend to share characteristics across nations, what people do with the Internet, once available, differs in some surprising ways. In this article we compare users in two disparate regions -- the United States and two countries of Central Asia -- in order to demonstrate that "The Internet" is not only a series of technologies rather than one technical innovation, but the utility of that series of innovations differs across contexts.

Previous research in Kyrgyzstan has demonstrated the importance of close social networks as avenues for gathering and sharing information, assistance and goods in the country. However, the relationship between technology use and social network use has not been investigated; understanding this relationship is important when considering the design of technology applications that support existing social networks. Contrary to Robert Putnampsilas hypothesis that technologies have an "individualizing" force on populations, we have found that social network patterns do not appear to be negatively associated with higher technology use. In fact, the higher the level of technology use, the more face-to-face social networks were used for multiple types of information seeking.

This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals.

We examine the extent to which user-based subsidies can promote the sustainability and development impact of telecenters, where sustainability is defined in financial and social terms. We do this by looking at a coupon scheme used by the USAID funded eCenter network in Kyrgyzstan. The network consisted of partnerships with existing commercial computer centers which provided fee-based ICT services to their communities. The eCenter program temporarily provided subsidized coupons for Internet access and computer training to users of these centers.

This paper argues that it is important to study non-instrumental uses of ICT, including computer games. Specifically, the article presents the results of qualitative and quantitative work spanning eight years of investigation in Central Asia focused on computer gaming in public Internet cafes as well as private spaces. The results presented demonstrate that people do indeed play games in resource constrained environments. The paper demonstrates that games constitute a significant portion of the ICT ecology in developing regions and provide a pathway to peoples “first touch” of a computer, that gamers have more frequent interaction with technology than basic Internet users, that games bring more diverse users to computers by providing a pathway to ICT use for people with lower levels of education, and that games can motivate innovation in the technology space. Additionally, our findings indicate that both genders engage in game playing. The article makes the case that games can be a source of informal learning about ICT, and as such, games and gaming culture in the developing world merit further study.

In this paper, we describe several findings from a multi-year, multi-method study of how information and communication technologies have been adopted and adapted in Central Asia. We have found that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption, that access to the Internet is primarily through public access sites carrying with it issues regarding privacy and surveillance, that people rely on their social networks as information sources, that public institutions tend to be fairly weak as citizen resources, and that information seeking and communication are conflated in people's usage patterns with different technologies. In addition, in the developed world social networking software has grown rapidly and shown itself to have significant potential for mobilizing a population. Based on the collection of findings from Central Asia and observing patterns of technology usage in other parts of the world, our research leads to the conclusion that exploring mobile social software holds significant potential as an ICT that meshes well with preexisting patterns of communication and information seeking and also leverages the most predominant pattern of technology adoption. Many of the findings from this research echo results from studies in other geographic areas, and so we anticipate that much of this research will be relevant to developing regions generally.