Pushing personhood into place: Situating media in rural knowledge in Africa

Abstract

Designing interactions with technologies that are compatible with rural wisdom and skills can help to digitally enfranchise rural people and, thus, contribute to community cohesion in the face of Africa's urbanization. Oral information has been integral to rural identity and livelihood in Africa for generations. However, the use of technology can inadvertently displace the knowledge of communities with practices that differ from the knowledge traditions in which technology is designed. We propose that devices that are sensitive to users' locations, combined with platforms for social networking and user-generated content, offer intriguing opportunities for rural communities to extend their knowledge practices digitally. In this paper we present insights on the way rural people of the Herero tribe manage information spatially and temporally during some of our design activities in Namibia. We generated these insights from ethnography and detailed analysis of interactions with media in our ongoing Ethnographic Action Research. Rural participants had not depicted their wisdom graphically by photography or video before, rarely use writing materials and some cannot read. Thus, we gathered 30 h of observer-and participant-recorded video and participants' interpretations and interactions with thumbnail photos from video, photography and paper. We describe insights into verbal and bodily interactions and relationships between bodies, movements, settings, knowledge and identity. These findings have made us more sensitive to local experiences of locations and more aware of assumptions about space and time embedded in locative media. As a result, we have started to adopt an approach that emphasizes connectors rather than points and social-relational and topokinetic rather than topographic spaces. In the final section of the paper we discuss applying this approach in design by responding to the ways that participants use social relationships to orient information and use voice, gesture and movement to incorporate locations into this ''dialogic''. In conclusion we outline why we hope our reflections will inspire others to examine the spatial, temporal and social affordances of technologies within the bonds of rural, and other, communities.

Homestead Creator: Using Card Sorting in Search for Culture-Aware Categorizations of Interface Objects

“…The open card sorting method supported the discovery of a new categorization scheme which we call location-relational. The pattern confirms prior research on Herero's prioritization of place as a meaningful location with activities and protocols attached to [13]. The findings dramatically changes our previous design ideas and future retrieval of interface objects will follow this new categorization scheme for ensuring intuitiveness and preservation of tacit knowledge in the interface.…”

Situating Asynchronous Voice in Rural Africa

“…The tablet's portability meant audio files trace spatial patterns such as pauses and sounds recorded along topokinetic paths when a person carried the tablet from one to the next in meetings and indications of the relative orientations of recorders and speakers. We have reported associations between bodies, utterances, spatiality and social relations in sense-making elsewhere in rural Africa [8], and we found that certain meanings emerge in Mankosi when gestures, social roles and the spatial arrangement of photos combined.…”

Globalization, Peace & Stability, Governance, and Knowledge Economy

“…discussions of the phenomenon (Rooney, 2005;Lin, 2006;Anyanwu, 2012); information & communication technologies (Butcher, 2011); education (Amavilah, 2009a;Ford, 2007;Weber, 2011;Wantchekon et al, 2014); institutional regime & economic incentives (Letiche, 2006;Cogburn, 2003;Andrés & Asongu, 2013); intellectual capital & economic development (Wagiciengo & Belal, 2012;Preece, 2013); innovation (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka & Sampath, 2007;Carisle et al, 2013); research & development ( Sumberg, 2005;German & Stroud, 2007); indigenous knowledge systems (Lwoga et al, 2010;Raseroka, 2008); KE in the transformation of space (Moodley, 2003;Maswera et al, 2008); intellectual property rights (Lor & Britz, 2005;Zerbe, 2005;Andrés & Asongu, 2013;Myburgh, 2011;Andrés et al, 2014); and spatiality in the production of knowledge (Bidwell et al, 2011;Neimark, 2012) .…”