Lilly Irani
Janet Vertesi
Paul Dourish
Rebecca E. Grinter
ABSTRACT
As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.
- Adas, M. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1989.Google Scholar
- Akrich, M. The Description of Technical Objects. In Shaping Technology / Building Society. MIT Press, 1992.Google Scholar
- Appadurai, A. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Google Scholar
- Bidwell, N.J., Standley, P., George, T., and Steffensen, V. The landscape's apprentice: lessons for place-centred design from grounding documentary. Proc. DIS 2008 (Cape Town, South Africa), ACM Press, 88--98. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brewer, E., Demmer, M., Du, B., et al. The case for technology in developing regions. Computer 38, 6 (2005), 25--38. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Butler, D. The race to wire up the poor. Nature 447, 7140 (2007), 6--7.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chan, A. Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru. Anthropological Quarterly 77, 3 (2004), 531--545.Google Scholar
- Chetty, M., Tucker, W., and Blake, E. Developing locally relevant software applications for rural areas: a South African example. Proc. SAICSIT 2004 (Stellenbosch, South Africa), ACM Press, 239--243. Google ScholarDigital Library
- da Costa Marques, I. Cloning computers: From rights of possession to rights of creation. Science as Culture 14, 2 (2005), 139.Google Scholar
- Easterbrook, S.M., Beck, E.E., Goodlet, J.S., Plowman, L., Sharples, M., and Wood, C.C. A Survey of Empirical Studies of Conflict. CSCW: Cooperation or Conflict, (1993), 1--68.Google Scholar
- Escobar, A. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press Princeton, 1995.Google Scholar
- Ess, C. and Sudweeks, F. Culture and Computer-Mediated Communication: Toward New Understandings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, 1 (2005), 179--191.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ferguson, J. The anti-politics machine:" development," depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
- Ferguson, J. Governing Extraction: New Spatializations of Order and Disorder in Neoliberal Africa. In Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Duke Univ Press, 2006.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Fisher, W.F. Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 1 (1997), 439--464.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gupta, A. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Duke Univ Press, 1998.Google Scholar
- Hall, E.T. Beyond culture. Anchor Books, 1977.Google Scholar
- Hayden, C. When nature goes public. Princeton Univ Press, Princeton, NJ, 2003.Google Scholar
- Hofstede, G. and Hofstede, G. Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind. McGraw-Hill, 2005.Google Scholar
- Lindtner, S., Mainwaring, S., Dourish, P., and Wang, Y. Situating Productive Play: Online Gaming Practices and Guanxi in China. In INTERACT 2009. 2009, 328--341. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marcus, A. and Gould, E.W. Crosscurrents: cultural dimensions and global Web user-interface design. interactions 7, 4 (2000), 32--46. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marcus, G.E. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, (1995), 95--117.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marsden, G. Designing technology for the developing world. interactions 13, 2 (2006), 39--59. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marsden, G., Maunder, A., and Parker, M. People are people, but technology is not technology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 366, (2008), 3795--3804.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Muller, M.J. Participatory Design: The Third Space in HCI. Handbook of HCI. Erlbaum, (2003). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Parikh, T.S., Javid, P., Ghosh, K., and Toyama, K. Mobile phones and paper documents: Evaluating a new approach for capturing microfinance data in rural India. Proc. CHI 2006 (New York, NY), ACM Press, 551--560. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Philip, K. What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property. Postcolonial Studies 8, 2 (2005), 199--218.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ramachandran, D., Kam, M., Chiu, J., Canny, J., and Frankel, J.F. Social dynamics of early stage co-design in developing regions. Proc. CHI 2007 (San Jose CA), ACM Press, 1087--1096. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Satchell, C. and Dourish, P. Beyond the User: Use and Non-Use in HCI. Proc. OzCHI 2007 (Melbourne, Australia, Nov 2009), ACM Press, . Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schain, M. The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Smith, A. The Alternative Technology Movement: An Analysis of its Framing and Negotiation of Technology Development. Human Ecology Review 12, 2 (2005), 106--119.Google Scholar
- Srinivasan, R. and Shilton, K. The South Asian web: an emerging community information system in the South Asian diaspora. Proc. PDC 2006 (Trento, Italy), ACM Press, 125--133. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suchman, L. Located accountabilities in technology production. Scand. J. Inf. Syst. 14, 2 (2002), 91--105. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suchman, L. Striking Likeness to Difference. 4S/EASST, (2008).Google Scholar
- Verran, H. and Christie, M. Digital Technologies and Aboriginal Knowledge Practice. (2006).Google Scholar
- Winograd, T. Bringing design to software. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development
Recommendations
Cultural hybridity in participatory design
PDC '12: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Exploratory Papers, Workshop Descriptions, Industry Cases - Volume 2In this paper we examine challenges identified with participatory design research in the developing world and develop the postcolonial notion of cultural hybridity as a sensitizing concept. While participatory design intentionally addresses power ...
Postcolonial language and culture theory for HCI4D
CHI EA '11: CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAs technology design spreads to less technologically developed countries, issues of cultural identity, language, and values manifest in the form of methodological and ethical challenges for HCI4D designers. We offer a new theoretical perspective, in the ...
HCI on the move: methods, culture, values
CHI EA '10: CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAs HCI is taken up across different cultures, its methods have typically been presumed to be culturally universal. Though evidence suggests that they are not, dimensions of cultural specificities of HCI methods are not understood. Through detailed ...
Comments