Last week was the 20th anniversary for the Ozchi conference, the leading forum for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in Australia and New Zealand.
I had the pleasure of presenting a paper co-authored with John MacFarlane, a producer at Digital Eskimo, Reflections on the role of Seeding in Social Design (pdf). In it we discuss the way in which social technologies, dependent on participation for success, bring into focus the dynamic and critical relationship between design and use. In social technologies the user literally determines the design, we (designers) only provide the platform. This is an interesting landscape for designers as our role starts to extend beyond constructing and making, to taking responsibility for facilitating and enabling participation. Designing and implementing social technologies successfully means also developing strategies for engagement.
At Digital Eskimo we are responding to this in a range of ways, including developing a range of codesign activities and applying participatory methods that attempt to facilitate the engagement of communities around a project or campaign. We refer to these as “seeding activities†and the paper presented some of our recent learnings, reflections and approaches.
There were a lot of great speakers at the conference, some of the highlights included Gary Marsdens (author of the excellent Mobile Interaction Design book) keynote on doing HCI in South Africa, or rather failing to do HCI. He generously presented on his mistakes and learnings, and provided an insight into some of the issues he encountered when applying traditional HCI assumptions and methods into this particular context. Gary discussed Mxit, the massively successful Mobile Instant Messenger, and presented some of his own innovative work, BigBoard, which uses Bluetooth to create a free community sharing tool.
Other highlights included the Indigenous Led Digital Enterprise panel, where Vicus Steffensen, from Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways and Troy Mallie from Cultural Systems Solutions (two different technology approaches to knowledge and land management for Indigenous communities) presented alongside Pasty Cameron (Telling Places in Country, Tasmania) and Yvonne Cadet-James (Gugu-Baden Cultural History, Townsville). Yolande Strengers also presented her excellent research into water usage, and how our social norms require us to wash and bath much more frequently that we really need to.
