ABSTRACT
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.
Supplemental Material
- Balabanovic, M., Chu, L.L. & Wolff G.J. (2000) Storytelling with digital photographs CHI 00 564--571. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bidwell, N.J. (2009) Anchoring Design to Rural Ways of Doing and Saying. INTERACT09. IFIP & Springer-Verlag: Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 686--699. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bidwell, N.J. & Browning, D. (2009) Pursuing Genius Loci: Interaction Design And Natural Places. Pers. Ubiq. Comp. 217. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chambers, R. (1994). The Origin and Practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development (22) 7.Google Scholar
- Crook, M. (2009) Radio Storytelling and Beyond. In Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Hartley, J. & McWilliam, K. eds. Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
- Erickson, T. (1996) Design as storytelling, Interactions 3 (4) 30--35. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Finnegan, R. (2007) The oral and beyond: doing things with words in Africa. Oxf./Chicago: James Currey/ UCP.Google Scholar
- Gaver, W. (2007) Cultural commentators: Non-native interpretations as resources for polyphonic assessment Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65(4) 292--305. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ginsburg, F. (1996) Mediating culture: Indigenous media, ethnographic film, and the production of identity. In: Fields of Vision, L Deveraux, R Hillman Eds. Univ of Calif. Pr.Google Scholar
- Hartley, J. & McWilliam, K. (2009) Computational Power Meets Human Contact. In Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Hartley, J. & McWilliam, K. eds. Wiley-Blackwell.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jokela, T., Lehikoinen, J.T. & Korhonen, H. (2008) Mobile multimedia presentation editor: enabling creation of audio-visual stories on mobile devices. CHI 08 63--72. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jones, M., Thom, E., Bainbridge, D., and Frohlich, D. (2009) Mobility, Digital Libraries and a Rural Indian Village. Proc. Joint Int. Conf. on Digital libraries. JCDL '09, ACM Pr. 309--312. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kensing, F. & Muni-Madsen, A. (1993) PD: Structure in the toolbox. Comms of the ACM 36(6) 78--85 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Klemmer, S., Hartmann, B., Takayam, L. (2006) How bodies matter: five themes for interaction design. DIS 06 140--149. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Landry, B.M. & Guzdial, M. (2006) Learning from Human Support: Informing the Design of Personal Digital Story-Authoring Tools. J. of the Int. Digital Media & Arts Assoc., 3(1) 106--119.Google Scholar
- Ong, W.J. (1982) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Reitmaier T. & Marsden G. (2009) Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Mobile. INTERACT09. IFIP & Springer-Verlag: Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci 750--753. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suchman, L. (2003) Located Accountabilities in Technology Production. Scandinavian J. of Information Systems Archive 14 (2) 91--105. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Winschiers, H. & Fendler, J. (2007) Assumptions Considered Harmful The Need to Redefine Usability. In: Usability and Internationalization, Part I, HCII 2007 Ed N. Aykin; LNCS Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wright, P. & McCarthy, J. (2008) Empathy and Experience in HCI. CHI 08 637--646. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zenani, N.M. & Scheub, H. (1992) The world and the word: tales and observations from the Xhosa oral tradition. Univ of Wisconsin Pr.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa
Recommendations
Field testing mobile digital storytelling software in rural Kenya
MobileHCI '10: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and servicesWe 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 ...
Situating digital storytelling within African communities
We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a ...
Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Mobile
INTERACT '09: Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part ITechnology has changed the way in which people tell their stories. This paper introduces digital storytelling and looks at why the mobile is an ideal platform for creating digital stories. The iterative design approach chosen for our Mobile Digital ...
Comments