HCI for Community and International Development

So far, inclusive design has addressed ageing and disability better than culture. But inclusion of emerging economies, developing countries and the particular challenges of designing technologies across cultures came under scrutiny at the CHI 2008 workshop on HCI for Community and International Development. The weekend workshop in Florence set its agenda to take on work begun at CHI the previous year. Fierce debates about identity and scope accompanied planning sessions and reports on current projects.

Political visualisations were the order of the day, with the Peters Projection map (which gives equal space to places of equal area, making the Global South appear far bigger than on conventional projections) used as the emblem of the workshop. The Peters map began the workshop too, with exercises conducted on a giant copy made with string, leaves and petals in the grounds of the fortezza conference space. Delegates were asked to find their place in the world and move round the map according to their trajectories in life. This allowed us all to trace each others’ passage from birth to studies to work institution to place of research. North America and Europe dominated training and employing institutions. Birth places and fields of research fanned out around the world.

A session on sharing tales of ‘things that might have gone better in the field’ offered good learning and support, but raised some particular issues. Although it was easy enough to tell these stories in small groups, the challenges of providing sufficient context to explain the matter clearly while protecting host communities, confidentialities and the like meant that there was a reluctance to share these stories more widely – even in the bigger forum of the whole group (about 40). This will be an interesting dynamic as the group attempts to devise, populate and popularise a story template for sharing experience.

In addition to the story template, promised outcomes were a book on methods, a collection of key essays to inform the field, special issues collecting contributions from the community so far, a bibliography and a review of ethics literature. This complements the work being led by Gary Marsden of the University of Cape Town to write a course for students in the field and produce a textbook. Activity is intended to support academic research, local capacity building and the interests of industrial R&D with an emphasis on community wellbeing as well as designing viable products.

Further workshops with related themes are scheduled for:

· PCF5, London, UK, 13-17 July 2008 Workshop: Learning To Design Technology Enhanced Learning For Rural Livelihoods
· PDC 2008 Indiana USA, 30th Sept - 4th Oct 2008 – panel and workshop
· HCIInternational 2009 San Diego USA 19th - 24th July 2009 – the 3rd International Conference on Internationalization, Design and Global Development forms part of this multiconference

We also intend to run workshops worldwide, so do volunteer to help plan or join us at the following:

- OZCHI 2008, 8th - 12th December, Cairns, Australia
- CHI 2009 Boston USA April 5th - 9th 2009
- ICTD 2009, Doha, Qatar, April 17th - 29th, 2009.
- IFIP Working group 9.4 conference, 26th - 28th May 2009, Dubai: "Assessing the contribution of ICT to Development Goals"
- INTERACT 2009 Upsala, Sweden, September 2009