Deliberate interactions

Abstract

We present results from a qualitative study examining how professionals living and working in Nairobi, Kenya regularly use ICT in their everyday lives. There are two contributions of this work for the HCI community. First, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating constraints our participants encountered when using technology in an infrastructure-poor setting. These constraints are limited bandwidth, high costs, differing perceptions of responsiveness, and threats to physical and virtual security. Second, we use our findings to critically evaluate the "access, anytime and anywhere" construct shaping the design of future technologies. We present an alternative vision called deliberate interactions-a planned and purposeful interaction style that involves offline preparation-and discuss ways ICT can support this online usage behavior.

Your Phone Has Internet - Why Are You at a Library PC? Re-imagining Public Access in the Mobile Internet Era

“…Indeed, it may often not be the same "internet" on the mobile, as access modes range from accessing WAP sites to running enclosed applications, such as a chat clients, to downloading premium content or games from operator websites [33]. We join other recent HCI papers to explore communicative ecologies and repertoires in resource constrained settings [34,35]. Communicative ecologies involve interactions among technologies, sociality, and discourse [36,37].…”

Chameleon Devices

“…Two of these researchers then reviewed the full data set across locations. Standard thematic analysis and reflection techniques were used as in other field work of this nature (e.g., [50])…”

“…Many emergent users are very aware of the dangers they face on a daily basis [50]. Understandably, then, participants were particularly protective and cautious about valuables such as mobile phones that are a tempting target for thieves -they would never use their phone in public view.…”

“…Firstly, we worked with people who live in contexts where security and safety are daily concerns and where people make a conscious effort to limit device visibility in public places [50]. Their intense understanding of the need to protect their mobiles while out and about led us to consider the opportunities around radically hiding a device in plain sight, in the same way the chameleon is able to.…”

Comparing web interaction models in developing regions

“…However, Research that focuses on constrained web search and web access is either dated [23,26] or, in the case of more recent work, is in the context of mobile devices [7,41,34,43,18,21]. While there is extensive literature about web usage in general, particularly in the WWW community [1], until very recently little effort has been directed at understanding the unique characteristics of Internet use in developing regions [13,9,40]. A few network constrained applications have been designed and implemented by splitting the application into a fully synchronous front end and an asynchronous back end [40,24,37,8].…”