Abstract:We take up Bødker's [9] challenge to 'identify' a fourth wave HCI, building on the work of Blevis et al. [8] and others to shore up a new vision that places 'politics and values and ethics' at the forefront without abandoning the strengths of previous waves. We insist that a fourth wave must push harder, beyond measured criticism for actual (e.g. institutional) change. We present two studies performed at CHI'19, where we used our MANIFESTO! game to: 1) take the temperature of colleagues on adopting an activist… Show more
“…The adoption of a manifesto in futuring African HCI identities was developed on the understanding of its politics in development studies [24,71], human-computer interaction [25,80,109] and different dimensions of decolonization [3]. In HCI, a manifesto is widely considered a political instrument that can challenge existing structures, principles, and discourses of organising society [25,80].…”
Section: Politics Of Manifesto and Design Futuring In And Beyond Hcimentioning
Research in HCI4D has continuously advanced a narrative of ‘lacks’ and ‘gaps’ of the African perspective in technoscience. In response to such misguided assumptions, this paper attempts to reformulate the common and perhaps unfortunate thinking about African practices of design in HCI4D – i.e., largely as a function of African societal predicaments and Western technocratic resolutions. Through critical reflection on a range of issues associated with post-colonialism and post-development, I examine the possibilities that various historical tropes might offer to the reinvention of the African perspective on innovation. This leads to the consideration of how engaging in critical discussions about the future dimensions of African HCI can allow for grappling with the effect of the coloniality of being, power and knowledge. Developing on the ideas of futuring as a way of dealing with the complexities of the present – in this case the coloniality of the imagination - the paper ends by discussing three tactical propositions for ‘remembering’ future identities of African innovation where the values of autonomy are known and acted upon.
“…The adoption of a manifesto in futuring African HCI identities was developed on the understanding of its politics in development studies [24,71], human-computer interaction [25,80,109] and different dimensions of decolonization [3]. In HCI, a manifesto is widely considered a political instrument that can challenge existing structures, principles, and discourses of organising society [25,80].…”
Section: Politics Of Manifesto and Design Futuring In And Beyond Hcimentioning
Research in HCI4D has continuously advanced a narrative of ‘lacks’ and ‘gaps’ of the African perspective in technoscience. In response to such misguided assumptions, this paper attempts to reformulate the common and perhaps unfortunate thinking about African practices of design in HCI4D – i.e., largely as a function of African societal predicaments and Western technocratic resolutions. Through critical reflection on a range of issues associated with post-colonialism and post-development, I examine the possibilities that various historical tropes might offer to the reinvention of the African perspective on innovation. This leads to the consideration of how engaging in critical discussions about the future dimensions of African HCI can allow for grappling with the effect of the coloniality of being, power and knowledge. Developing on the ideas of futuring as a way of dealing with the complexities of the present – in this case the coloniality of the imagination - the paper ends by discussing three tactical propositions for ‘remembering’ future identities of African innovation where the values of autonomy are known and acted upon.
“…When we write manifestos with academics – for example, using our purpose-built card game, MANIFESTO! (Figure 1) – we see them using the form to ‘speak collectively, build consensus, raise awareness, advocate for and accelerate change, speak for and from the margins, disrupt the status quo, unsettle stuck discourse, sidestep conventional modes, expose broken promises’ and other similar purposes (Ashby et al, 2019: 2).Figure 1.MANIFESTO! The Game was first developed in 2019 as a way of introducing individual and collaborative manifesto writing to academic audiences.…”
Section: Manifestos In An Academic Contextmentioning
“…HCI basically deals with the design of a system's functionality and usability (Preece et al 1994;Karray 2008;Te'eni 2006), and to produce a three dimensional affective fit-between the user, the machine, and the required services-in order to achieve a certain performance both in quality and optimality of the services (Te'eni 2006). However, the HCI design paradigm moved through four evolutionary waves: its predominant focus of model-driven human factors, and technology tool functionalities in its first wave; to user-centered work contexts and efficient interactions within well established communities of practice based on participatory design theories in its second wave; and on to broader use contexts, affective interactions, embodied actions, and situated aspects of user activities in its third wave (Preece et al 1994;Bødker 2006Bødker ,2015Karray et al 2008;Fernaeus et al 2009;Helander 2014); most recently moving to 'politics, values, and ethics' in its emerging fourth wave (Ashby et al 2019). Our richer metadata design for representing user embodied actions relates to the current research on HCI, in particular its third and fourth waves.…”
It is important to design digital infrastructure that can better accommodate multicultural and pluralistic views from its foundations. It is insufficient to look at only the responses and influences of culture on technology without considering how the technology can be adapted in anticipation of, and to support, pluralistic multicultural perspectives in its original design. This goes beyond the simple act of supporting multiple languages and interfaces, but should include the ability of digital and data infrastructure to capture and accommodate pluralistic views, supporting multiple perspectives in the representation and processing of the data itself. In this work, we look at how rethinking the representation of data can allow us to more directly tackle domains that are typically hampered due to intercultural differences, and their inevitable losses in translation, particularly losses of valuable information like context and intention. When we refer to a loss of context and intention, we are referring to the loss of semantic information when practices such as referencing and citation are hard-coded to a particular set of cultural norms. We show that it is possible to expand the way in which we track referential data to capture richer semantic information regarding the contexts and intentions of the creators of this data, and thereby better serve the varied needs of those who consume, study, and refer to such data. We demonstrate this concept through a prototype system for a multicultural digital infrastructure, which we have named MultiVerse, and discuss its ethical implications from the perspectives of ‘multistability’, Intercultural Information Ethics framework, and poststructuralism.
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