?She looked deep into our eyes?: reflections on cross-cultural practice in rural Africa

Authors

  • Thomas Reitmaier

Keywords:

storytelling, digital technology, Kenya, cultural practices, rural development, learning, computing systems

Abstract

This paper shows the development of a mobile digital storytelling system that suits the needs and functions of rural African communities. But rather than focusing solely on the artefact and how it was designed, I also present an account of the ideas and perspectives I took, and how these changed in the course of practice. I uncover the slow process of discovering that cross-cultural practice is not only about understanding users or prototyping ideas in a detached fashion, but explore how in the course of practice pre-existing notions embedded in ourselves and in our culture are ?unconcealed?. It is a learning process in which we learn about users in relation to ourselves. The prototype was tested in Adiedo, Kenya.

References

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Bidwell, N.J., Reitmaier, T., Marsden, G., and Hansen, S., 2010. Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa. In: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems ? CHI ?10. New York: ACM Press, 1593?1602.
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Published

2019-09-06