Yesterday, the workshop Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design in Developing Regions took place in Uppsala, Sweden and around the world, as people where joining presentations and discussions online including from the UK, Madeira, and Malaysia. The workshop is part of the INTERACT2009 conference, which takes place from 24-28 August.

Eight very interesting papers were presented and discussed during the workshop. For example, Andy Dearden raised the question of how to analyse the risks of unintended consequences; Maira Carvalho investigated different approaches for designing interactive systems at a distance, where researchers don’t have access to the users; Chu Yin Wong presented a user-centred design process for developing a mobile community service addressing the deaf in Malaysia; Eugene Danilkis and Sofia Nunes presented results from their field research on mobile banking in Mozambique; Pam McLean talked about the work she is doing at Dadamac, and how this can benefit researchers.

An important issue that Ida Horner raised in her presentation, and which we have also experienced during our work in Zanzibar, was the importance of doing research in the field and familiarising yourself with the environment, before implementing anything. Ida stressed that it is particularly important to understand how communities are organised. Otherwise researchers run into conflicts before they even started.

Overall, I expected the workshop to focus more on interaction design and experiences regarding methodologies, while most of the discussions that followed each presentation focused on ethical issues, often raising high-level problems that interaction designers might not always be able to solve. These issues were also reflected by the workshop themes, but the questions that remained for me where: what is the role of interaction designers in developing regions, how is it different to their role in more traditional contexts, and what are appropriate methodologies?

An interesting discussion emerged around problem solving, which seems to be a very engineering/technology-driven approach, and whether this approach is appropriate in a developing context. Are interaction designers solving problems? And are researchers bound to only generate new knowledge and understanding, but not supposed to solve problems? Although being an academic I personally don’t completely agree on that, but maybe that is only because I always had one foot in industry projects as well. I would be interested to hear others’ opinions on this.

We also presented our paper Designing an SMS-based application for seaweed farmers in Zanzibar (and why it failed for now) at the Workshop. In this paper we discuss a project that we started, while we were in Tanzania again last year, working on the Hello Africa movie. The project described in the paper was not successful measured by our initial goals. It was successful given the insights that we gained by applying a user-centred design approach in the field. The aim of the paper is to share our conclusions of why the project failed, since we believe that many projects in an African context might experience similar challenges. Below are the slides from our presentation.

All workshop papers are available from here. Many thanks to Andy Dearden and Niall Winters for organising this event! It’s a really valuable step towards better understanding the roles and ethical issues interaction designers need to be aware of in developing contexts.

The International Journal of ICT Research and Development in Africa (IJICTRDA) is a new journal on research, advanced analytical methods and techniques, leading e-innovations, and development policies in information and communication technology adoption and diffusion in Africa and around the globe.

Topics that will be covered in the journal include ICT applications in agriculture and rural development, agribusiness supply chain management, coordination and integration, food security, poverty alleviation, food and agricultural marketing linkages, and rural financial service delivery.

The Editor-in-Chief currently invites authors to consider submitting articles to be featured in the inaugural issue of the journal. Articles may report on empirical research investigations, theoretical frameworks, case studies and major trends in ICT applications in food and agriculture, and rural development.

Being member of the Editorial Advisory Board of IJICTRDA, I’m especially looking forward to seeing submissions on case studies with an emphasis on interaction design and the design process in general. We will also cover published articles on this weblog, once the first journal is out.

For more information visit the publisher website or see the journal brochure.

A few days ago I attended a talk by Jeanette Blomberg at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Jeanette worked at Xerox PARC in the 80s and is currently at IBM research. The talk was about ethnography and design, based on her experience from working as an ethnographer in a technology context for the last 25 years.

Since ethnographic research is really relevant for the design of ICT4D solutions and probably most of our readers have used ethnographic methods themselves in their work before, I decided to post a short summary of my notes here.

Jeanette started with a nice introduction about ethnographic research and presented the following principles of ethnography:

• study activities in their everyday settings
• focus on relations among activities and people (interactions) and not on single tasks or isolated individuals
• descriptive accounts of activity
• member’s point of view
• focus on what people do

She further emphasized how ethnography should be seen as a collection of multiple methods for collecting data, including informal interviews, observations, self-reporting, video analysis, artifact analysis, etc. It’s also important to “adjust as you go”, since ethnography is a very improvisational approach, which requires iteration. This is a very important issue in my opinion and something that I personally often find difficult to implement in an academic context, where you have to define your research approach in detail beforehand.

Another interesting insight that I took away from this presentation was that participatory design (PD) is often used as ethnographic method, meaning that ethnographers don’t only observe people without interfering (one of the myths about ethnography), but also involve them in the design process. Apparently a joining of PD and ethnography happened in the middle 80s.

PD in an ICT4D context has been done (e.g. for developing community radios), but as Gary Marsden said during a session on mobile interaction design at last year’s MobileActive conference, it often doesn’t work to involve users for informing the design process in developing countries. Or more specific, the context and hence the requirements are different to developed countries, where PD and user-centered design (UCD) have been successfully applied and explored for many decades.

The talk ended with a discussion of how both technologies and goals have changed over time. Technology is currently developing towards an anytime/anywhere approach and technology-enabled services. (Very true for ICT4D.) Goals have changed from improving the quality of work life (in the 80s) to designing more usable and useful technologies, and more success products. Recent trends show that now the most important goal often is to design more sustainable (”green”) products. (Again, something that is very true for ICT4D, considering that resources are scarce in developing countries.)

Thanks to Jeanette Blomberg for this really insightful talk and thanks to UTS for organizing the event.

As some of our readers already know I moved to Sydney in the beginning of this year to join the Faculty of Architecture, Design & Planning at the University of Sydney.

Since my position involves teaching as well as research (40% of my working time as I learned today), I will also push forward research on ICT4D (in the context of interaction design and HCI) as one of my research streams.

The group where I’m working also just started a very exciting master program, called M.IDEA, which stands for Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts. Check out the program here and an interview that I gave recently here.

A quick note on two events that were announced recently: The 1st International Conference on Mobile Development (mDEVELOPMENT 2009) will take place in Barcelona 2-4 September 2009. It seems that the conference has emerged from last years mLife event , where they held a session on mobile development.

The other event is a workshop organized by Matt Jones and Gary Marsden on the theme “Taking Ubicomp Beyond Developed Worlds” (Globi-Comp 2009). The workshop will be held at the Ubicomp 2009 conference, which I find really exciting, since I’ve previously published at this conference myself. It’s really about time that ICT4D establishes its place in this community.

The events have also been added to our list of conferences.

Just yesterday we had a small presentation of our work and the UZI-film project for the Designing Comfort (DECO) group at the Research Group for Industrial Software - Vienna University of Technology.

We presented the idea of ICT4D in general and the purpose behind our platform ICT4D.at. Furthermore we showed some clips we filmed in Africa last month. As we presented for an academic audience, we included some slides on interesting institutions in ICT4D.

Our current mission in this regard is to monitor our material for interesting scientific conclustions.