Exploring sociotechnical gaps in an intercultural, multidisciplinary design project (original) (raw)
Related papers
A resource kit for participatory socio-technical design in rural kenya
2008
Abstract We describe our approach and initial results in the participatory design of technology relevant to local rural livelihoods. Our approach to design and usability proceeds from research in theory and practice of cross-cultural implementations, but the novelty is in beginning not with particular technologies but from community needs, and structuring technology in terms of activities.
2015
This thesis describes and reflects on the effectiveness of integrating contextmapping as both a methodology and interaction design practice in order to co-design digital products with and for developing communities. A Design as research methodology is applied in this study within the specific contexts of a codesign project involving small-scale urban farmers in Soweto. The final design outcomes of the project are the interaction design documents reflecting the design requirements of a mobile application as well as a low-level prototype demonstrating a number of the identified requirements contained in the documentation. The study assumes a human-centred design ethos that positions problems facing users as contextual, complex and indeterminate and requiring a degree of consideration and understanding by the designer before they can be resolved. The design process applied in this study therefore focused on gaining an understanding of the farmers' life experiences in order to design effective and empathetic technological solutions that will be meaningful and useful to the farmers. For this purpose, contextmapping and interaction design theory, methods and tools were integrated. Examples of this integration include the application of Hassenzahl's Three Level Hierarchy of Needs model to guide the exploration of the farmers' experiences and contexts, the use of contextmapping's Sensitization Phase and generative tools to generate user research data and lastly, contemporary interaction design tools such as problem-ecology maps, personas and user-journey diagrams to develop and communicate design concepts to the farmers. The study concludes that this integration of contextmapping and interaction design is effective, in particular through its enablement of community participation in contributing meaningfully to the codesign process while further ensuring that contributions made by the participants are relevant and actionable to the interaction design.
Editorial Special Issue Editorial: Cultural Aspects of Interaction Design
The notion of interaction design has become an indispensable aspect in any new product design and development, especially for those products with embedded information technologies. While traditional industrial design focuses on a product's functionality and its physical features, interaction design requires different perspectives and approaches for increasingly complex design problems. New technologies such as networking and embedded technologies provide opportunities to develop new categories of products with a much wider range of services that combine many physical and informational functions. Since such products are more interactive and are more pervasive in our daily activities, design calls for much deeper understanding from more diverse perspectives of product use. This discussion applies not only to physical products but also to other forms of artifacts. For instance, communication media have gone through an astonishingly rapid transformation, from print media to digital media--further extending their ubiquity and interactivity. This technological development has introduced new types of functionality, related for example to control, monitoring, searching, and transactions for many different applications. New technologies such as the Internet and mobile phone networks have changed the way people live and work. Such technological changes are taking place in the social and cultural landscapes of our daily life, and are fundamentally affecting many aspects of our lives.
Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction
The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories, the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users" cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya.
Socio-technical systems and interaction design - 21st century relevance
2014
This paper focuses on the relationship between the socio-technical system and the usertechnology interface. It looks at specific aspects of the organisational context such as multiple user roles, job change, work processes and workflows, technical infrastructure, and the challenges they present for the interaction designer. The implications of trends such as more mobile and flexible working, the use of social media, and the growth of the virtual organisation, are also considered. The paper also reviews rapidly evolving technologies such as pervasive systems and artificial intelligence, and the skills that workers will need to engage with them. Research into the operations and structures of organisations has identified the main elements that make up the socio-technical system (Eason, 2010). These include: 1. The collective operational task where the system undertakes the operational delivery of the overall task objectives.
1A Reflection on Designing Low-End Interactive Products for Rural Users in Sub-Sahara Africa
2016
One of the most widely used interactive products by non-western users in developing countries is the mobile phone. Further, the mobile phone market in western countries is rapidly getting saturated (IDC, 2013). It is therefore likely that the market for the next billion mobile phones is among low-end users in the emerging economies. However, to design effective mobile phones or low-end portable technology for these radically different users, research indicates that first, ethnography and ethical participatory design methods need to be used in the design phase and second, in the usability testing phase, current usability evaluation methods need to be adapted and possibly develop new ones that are more appropriate. Through our research in the adaptation and design of interactive technology for Kenyan farmers we illustrate how these suggestions can be put in practice. Sites like the Kenyan one we refer to have now become places of local and global negotiations, where the key insights a...
Technology and interaction in the realm of social design: role, influence and value
Social design is the most commonly used term to identify an emergent design area that applies its process, thinking, skills and tools to answer complex social problems. Its practices, methods and outputs are unconventional and probably result today in new ways of working with and using technology. However, there is no tool or way in the design community capable of recognising the actual influence, role and value of technology and interaction, partly due to a generalized lack of research in this domain. So the challenge is to gain deeper understanding on how and why technologies are being used in social design projects. Are they assets or obstacles? Do they slow or speed up processes? Are they means or solutions? How they affect and are affected by this new social context in design? In this paper we analyse several social design projects identifying ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ technology and interaction appear or determine these projects. Moreover, we aim to build a pre-model analysis capable of recognising the influence and value of technology in the social design realm.