Nicola J Bidwell | University of Namibia (original) (raw)

Nicola J Bidwell

From June 2014 i became Professor of Computer Science (HCI) in University of Namibia. I am also affiliated with Digital Ethnography Group, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia) and Department of Informatics, University of Pretoria (South Africa). My main focus at the moment is contributing to facilitating Namibian academics and students in undertaking research, for their country on their own terms. Since 2003 I have focused on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Design for rural contexts and knowledge practices that contrast with those that typify technology-design. I apply situated, ethnographic and participatory methods and usually live rurally - for the past few years in a geographically remote African village. This has enabled me to work with Aboriginal communities in Australia and in villages in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique, to live in technology-sparse, often incredibly beautiful, 'natural' environments and learn from the wisdom of the land, as i engage with the footsteps of its people. Increasingly, I am vocal about decolonising design and draw on Africa's own rich intellectual legacy.

Most of my 90 peer-reviewed publications relate to designing interactions with mobile devices, information systems and simulated environments that suit the needs of inhabitants of, and visitors to, rural and often impoverished places.

I takes a critical design perspective and seeks to design for envelopment, a word coined by Michael Christie to express using technology for local priorities. In 2008 i chaired the first international conference in HCI (OZCHI08) that included a panel on Indigenous Led Digital Enterprises and emphasized non-urban contexts. In 2011 i was founding chair of Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a new Technology Design Paradigm. I also serve on the program and editorial committees of major mainstream conferences and journals in HCI.

I have researched and/or lectured at Universities in the UK (London, Sussex and Cambridge), Australia (ANU, Queensland and Charles Darwin) and South Africa (Cape Town and Nelson Mandela). I was a programme director of an undergraduate degree in virtual worlds and Deputy Head of the School of IT, James Cook University (Cairns, Australia).

I have Honours in Biology and Psychology (Stirling); a PhD in neurophysiology (Queen Mary, London); and, a Masters in IT (Queensland). I spent her first years of life in Africa and has been a third culture kid ever since - living for many years in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

These days i am interested in re-inverting, so the 'pathways along which [my] life is lived' are turned from 'the boundaries within which it is enclosed'. i have (rather clumsily) begun by thinking about how we can 'do' rural landscape in design, rather than perform on it. i am much inspired by Tim Ingold's writings.
At this stage such pursuits seem boundaries away from the end of the 1980s when i was an experimental biologist. Much less able to embrace ambiguity as i modeled optomotor processing in honeybees using neurophyisological and behavioural biology tools (such as testing honeybee trajectories with sinusoidal gratings and air-puffs). It would be nice to place the Nature paper that my PhD and early post-doc work culminated in within some other context than 'looks good on the CV'.
Address: www.nicbidwell.me/

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Papers by Nicola J Bidwell

Springer eBooks, 2011

This one-day workshop aims to present different local and indigenous perspectives from all over t... more This one-day workshop aims to present different local and indigenous perspectives from all over the world in order to lead into an international dialogue on re-framing concepts and models in HCI/Interaction Design. The target audience is HCI researchers and practitioners who have experience with working with culture and HCI. The expected outcome of the workshop is a) network building among the participants, b) a shortlist of papers that can be basis for a proposal for a special issue of the UAIS journal, and c) identify opportunities to develop a funded network or research proposal.

The purpose of this document is to gather in one place some basic knowledge about the institution... more The purpose of this document is to gather in one place some basic knowledge about the institutional and economic framework for Community Radio in Ireland, Romania, and Portugal. In particular, we will try to summarize the main rules and regulations<br> defining the process to obtain the licenses for broadcasting in these countries and the economic management of stations and sources of income, as well as the main initial costs experienced by the stations of the Grassroots Wavelengths project.<br> One of the objectives of the project is to support the communities involved in the definition of station governance strategies. From the beginning, we realized how different institutional and economic frameworks in different contexts have a strong influence on the processes of creation and management of the stations. Therefore, we considered it important to describe these frameworks as simply as possible so that both the actors involved and new communities interested in starting ...

In this paper we discuss the influence of the unique local environment and culture on students an... more In this paper we discuss the influence of the unique local environment and culture on students and teaching styles in the IT degree at James Cook University Cairns Campus. In this degree program games are used to motivate self-directed study and increase student engagement in first and second year programming subjects, and also to generate interest in learning new technologies such as programming for mobile devices. We discuss the use of a mixed reality location based game to improve attitude to teamwork by integrating students in a games subject and a general IT software engineering subject. Students learn the value of community engagement through links to a local primary school for design and evaluation of games, to ensure a balanced approach to user requirements, game design and implementation. Students have explored niche applications of games through the development of a game for children with disabilities.

While our cross-cultural IT research continuously strives to contribute towards the development o... more While our cross-cultural IT research continuously strives to contribute towards the development of HCI appropriate cross-cultural models and best practices, we are aware of the specificity of each development context and the influence of each participant. Uncovering the complexity within our current project as an international team with experiences from three different continents reveals a set of challenges and opportunities for growing global design communities.

Abstract. In this paper we report findings generated during the early phase of a research project... more Abstract. In this paper we report findings generated during the early phase of a research project that aims to design and develop social media sharing systems to benefit marginalized communities. Studies of cell-phone network users in the developing world have shown that the relatively high tariffs for network access have resulted in new and innovate uses of technology to circumvent these costs. In this paper we describe a completely new form of service appropriation and how it is being used to overcome tariff costs in a remote rural area of South Africa. In this country, cell-phone providers offer a highly constrained form of free messaging to their subscribers called “callback”. These requests contain the caller’s cell-phone number and the recipient’s very short personalized message. Up to five free callback requests can be sent per day to any South African cell-phone network. This service is provided for emergencies when as pay-as-you-go customers do not have any airtime left. Ho...

It is my privilege to welcome you to this most tropical OZCHI conference, to celebrate with you 2... more It is my privilege to welcome you to this most tropical OZCHI conference, to celebrate with you 20 years of conferences and to thank you for traveling so far to do so. I chose our theme to recognise how interactions are critically defined by, as much as defining of, life-experiences in varied settings. A theme resonating with locating OZCHI08 in a place that, I hope, will invoke reflection on the opportunities and responsibilities that designing for cultural, social and ecological diversity brings. Welcome to the Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction. OZCHI is Australia and New Zealand's leading forum for work in all areas of human-computer interaction. As the annual conference for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA), OZCHI attracts an international community of researchers and practitioners with a wide range of interests, including usability, informatio...

Journal of Peer Production, 2018

This article considers tensions between the meanings in discourses that promote Community Network... more This article considers tensions between the meanings in discourses that promote Community Networks (CNs), or locally owned, managed and operated telecommunications networks, and meanings in rural communities in the Global South that the CNs intend to serve. My analysis reflects observing international advocacy for CNs, multiple case research in Argentina, Mexico, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Uganda, and my participation in the African CN movement including setting up a Namibian CN. I propose advocacy for CNs tends to puts “commoning”, or
practices that produce, reproduce and use the commons, at the periphery. My analysis shows that advocates for CNs tend to reify relations and bound resources in CNs and omit the way that the fabric of a CN is embedded in the
ongoing trajectories of inhabitants’ lives. Secondly, in promoting monetary metrics over more nuanced evaluations of the benefit and costs of human connectivity, they prioritise the visibility of certain achievements and ascribe more value to technical resources than to social co-ordination. These emphases contribute to inequalities within CNs, reinforce interdependence with capitalism and may unsettle cohesion in communities, and thus, I suggest, foreclose the opportunity for CNs to be sustainable alternatives to concentrations of telecommunications power.

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2011

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We reflect on long trials of two prototype social media systems in rural South Africa and their b... more We reflect on long trials of two prototype social media systems in rural South Africa and their biases towards certain communication practices on information sharing. We designed the systems to as-sist people in low-income communities to share locally relevant information. Both involve communal displays, to record, store and share media, and users can transfer media between the display and their cell-phones. MXShare, which we report for the first time, also enables real-time, text-based chat but AR enables sharing only audio files asynchronously. Both systems were located at the same sites for community communication and co-present oral practices effected media recording and sharing. Their use rein-forced differentiations in sharing information between older and younger people. We argue that designing social media systems to widen information access must respond to complex interactions between social structures and genres of communication.

We reflect on activities to design a mobile application to enable rural people in South Africa’s ... more 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. Author Keywords digital story...

Cadernos Pagu, 2020

Community Networks (CNs) can provide access to telecommunications in low-income rural areas that ... more Community Networks (CNs) can provide access to telecommunications in low-income rural areas that are excluded by dominant connectivity models. Women and older people often constitute relatively higher proportions of these populations, thus this paper explores interactions between technology, gender and age in three CNs in rural Africa, Latin America and South Asia. All cases are situated both in local governance structures dominated by men, including a tribal authority, indigenous assembly, and a village council; and in collectivist cultures where women are involved in community work but not in decision-making. I generated data about people’s everyday practices and opinions in relation to their local CNs in focus group discussions and interviews of different sorts with 76 men and 60 women, including network initiators, champions, operators, users and non-users. Older women significantly contributed volunteer labour but were less likely to use their CN, for instance because they did ...

Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 2004

In this paper, we discuss foundations, requirements and first experiences with a mobile informati... more In this paper, we discuss foundations, requirements and first experiences with a mobile information system that supports, and is ecologically compatible with, human vision-based navigation and acquirement of spatial knowledge during movement through the physical world. The appliance assists a person finding his/her way from an origin to a destination by providing an egocentric (viewer-centered) rather than an abstract top-down map-type view of the surrounding environment. We illustrate the use of the application in a foreign, or partially familiar, built environment of the scale of a small town or university campus and discuss first field experiments exploring egocentric way-finding support.

Oral History Journal of South Africa, 2016

Digital tools for User Generated Content (UGC) aim to enable people to interact with media in con... more Digital tools for User Generated Content (UGC) aim to enable people to interact with media in conversational and creative ways that are independent of technology producers or media organisations. In this article we describe two case studies in South Africa that show that UGC is not simply something tied to technology or the internet but emerges in non-digital storytelling. At the District Six Museum in Cape Town, District Six ex-residents are central collaborators in the narratives presented. Ex-residents tell stories in the museum and can write onto inscriptive exhibits, such as a floor map showing where they used to live, and visitors can write messages on â€˜memory clothesâ€™, which are later preserved through hand embroidery. Such explicit infrastructures to access and protect cultural records are less available to rural inhabitants of the former Transkei. To address this gap local traditional leaders and villagers collaborated with a National Archives Outreach Programme by co-g...

Interactions, 2010

... are basic components of social relations, but their expression varies culturally; we tend to ... more ... are basic components of social relations, but their expression varies culturally; we tend to ignore how that shapes performing identity and ... I began by living for two months in a traditional Xhosa homestead in the remote and impoverished Eastern Cape of South Africa, and in the ...

Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group on Design: Open 24/7 - OZCHI '09, 2009

We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise &amp;#39;primar... more We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise &amp;#39;primary orality&amp;#39;, or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology ambiance and cultural antecedents. We focus on issues and relationships between rural contexts and primary orality of relevance to our projects with Indigenous people in regional Australia and villagers in remote rural

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

An increasing range of initiatives aim to enable rural communities in developing regions to gener... more An increasing range of initiatives aim to enable rural communities in developing regions to generate their own, non-text based, digital content to share local stories, information and concerns. Video, photos and audio offer new resources for practices that give communities' a sense of identity and continuity and that members acquire in relationships with each other, their environment and history via speech, gesture, song, music, drama, ritual, skills or crafts. However, these contexts pose challenges for designing interactions within frameworks that have a heritage of text and indirect orality and which emphasize particular communication dynamics and structures. We seek to create new design directions based on insights into local ways of 'doing and saying' gained in interactions with people living under traditional law and custom in the Xhosa Kingdom of Pondoland, South Africa. This paper distils themes from an ethnography when the author lived according to local norms and constraints and cogenerated design activities, situated in the community's priorities, customary power relations and consensus-based practice. We reflect on communication in ordinary and extraordinary activities, and sociotechnical 'experiments' from using social networking websites to storytelling with blogs. We describe how indexicality dynamically shares context and entwines a person's identity with physical setting; and, how practices, such as prolonged discussion, diachronic repetition and synchronous utterance, build rapport, collective memory and cohesion. We propose that these practices inspire ways that local social structures can impact on activities to design systems of organization for information sharing, with occasional reference to our observations of other rural peoples in north Mozambique and north Australia.

This is the proceedings of the Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference, (IKTC 2011) in Windhoe... more This is the proceedings of the Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference, (IKTC 2011) in Windhoek, Namibia. The aim of the conference was to pursue a critical dialogue that considers the tensions arising in representing indigenous knowledge digitally and the factors that contribute to these tensions. Through this we intend to identify opportunities and new epistemological and methodological perspectives that will enable developing technologies that can extend the practices of indigenous knowledge and support the emergence of local socio-technical systems globally. The theme of the conference: “Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a new Technology Design Paradigm” was chosen to raise awareness of the fact that Indigenous knowledge systems differ fundamentally from the knowledge systems that underlie technology development. Numerous initiatives aim to enable remote diverse communities to share their wisdom and practical know-how with conventional digital technologies but often o...

AI & SOCIETY, 2014

Efforts to design voice-based, social media platforms for low-literacy communities in developing ... more Efforts to design voice-based, social media platforms for low-literacy communities in developing countries have not widened access to information in the ways intended. This article links this to who describes the relations that constitute personhood and how these relations are expressed in designing and deploying systems. I make these links oriented by critique in human-computer interaction that design continues a history of colonialism and embeds meanings in media that disrupt existing communication practices. I explore how we translated 'logics' about sociality through logics located outside of the rural South African community that we targeted for design and deployment. The system aimed to enable inhabitants to record, store and share voice files using a portable, communally owned display. I describe how we engaged with inhabitants, to understand needs, and represented and abstracted from encounters to articulate requirements, which we translated into statements about technology. Use of the system was not as predicted. My analysis suggests that certain writing cultures, embedded in translations, reify knowledge, disembody voices and neglect the rhythms of life. This biases social media towards individualist logics and limits affordances for forms, genres and other elements of communication that contribute to sociality. Thus, I propose oral practices offer oppositional power in designing digital bubbles to support human togetherness and that we can enrich design by moving the centre-a phrase taken from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Moving the centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms, James Currey, London, 1993) who insists that liberation from colonialism requires plural sites of creativity. To realize this potential, we need radically different approaches that enable symmetrical translation.