I'm Susan Wyche and I'm an Associate Professor in Michigan State University's Department of
Media and Information. Here I will present my paper titled "Reimagining the Mobile Phone Investigating
Speculative Approaches to Design in Human Computer Interaction for Development or HCI4D.
So within the field of HCI4D and HCI more broadly design has traditionally been used
to solve problems. Mobile phone applications primarily intended to address health and education
challenges in low and middle income countries are a prominent example of these efforts.
In this paper, I argue that design especially speculative approaches can play a different role
in HCI4D in the paper I present a collection of 9 speculative design concepts that are intended to
raise questions about mobile phones especially how they're designed and what they're used for
these concepts are inspired by my more than 10 years of studying mobile phone use, primarily in
Kenya. They also draw from my own design training and I use that to imagine and develop these ideas.
In the paper's discussion I elaborate on how speculative design approaches
can benefit the field of HCI4D by prompting questions about whether or not the field is
actually solving the right problems and also discussing how speculative
design is useful for drawing attention to other topics to consider in the field.
Speculative approaches to design are related to design fiction, Afrofuturism, and other design
practices that pose difficult questions about the relationship between design technology and
culture. The approach mostly contrasts the largely uncritical ones used in industry and academia
it also draws attention to other ways that design can contribute to knowledge about technology.
Speculative designs lets designers use their skills to create artifacts that are
not intended to be mass-produced instead the approach lets designers use design to
provoke discussions about what the future might look like, to reimagine technologies,
and to think differently about how technology is used in other approach
the approach has been impactful in the field of HCI, it has not been widely used in HCI4D.
As I previously mentioned, this project draws from my 10 plus years of studying mobile phones mostly
at sites in rural Kenya the concepts are also informed by conversations with Kenyans who have
witnessed the increased access to mobile phones in their country. These experiences have made me
skeptical of mobile apps, for a lot of reasons, the most important is that after conducting hundreds
of interviews with low-income mobile phone users in rural areas in multiple African countries I've
never met anyone who actually relies on a mobile app to access health information or to improve
their literacy. In this paper I elaborate on findings for my field work and how it informed
my design process and inspired the concepts in the paper. Here I just present two of these concepts.
This is a speculative concept for a mobile phone cover or case that comes with the metal fastener
a lock and key that you use to physically lock the phone. This was inspired by a couple of
observations a desire especially among women to have more control over their mobile devices and
to prevent members of their family from accessing it also you see brass locks like the ones in the
image here all over Kenya and they're used to prevent access to things, so I imagine
integrating it this lock into a mobile phone cover for similar reasons to prevent access.
Why? What has become abundantly clear that these digital mechanisms that ask users to enter a
passcode or pass password don't always work they don't always give users significant control over
who has access to their mobile phone and you see an example of one of these interfaces in
red and I found that these interfaces generate a tremendous amount of confusion for example people
ask questions about why when they enter a number into their phone's keypad or star or asterisk
appears on the screen I've also encountered people who simply forget their passcode or passwords over
time because they're not used very often. So integrating a brass padlock into the mobile
phone's cover seems like a design that can amplify existing practices rather than replacing them
more broadly this is a concept that's meant to raise questions about the limitations of these
digital authentication methods which have been primarily developed for Western users.
This is another speculative concept for a mobile voice assistant designed for Kenyans this concept
was inspired by Kenyan's knowledge and use of multiple languages similar to many African
countries Kenya is a multilingual one Swahili and English are the country's official languages
however, most Kenyans speak these in addition to one of their country's 30+ vernacular languages
they also engage in code switching which is a linguistic term that refers to alternating
between two or more languages in a single conversation however to the best of my knowledge
Mobile voice assistants don't account for these practices, things like Apple's Siri and Google's
Assistant. In fact these technologies are primarily designed for English and
monolingual speakers so this concept is meant to draw attention to these biases in design
more broadly it's intended to raise questions about the limitations of machine translation.
African languages are numerous and complex, I speculate that even though something like this
could be developed it would never effectively support the complexities of language use in
multilingual societies. So what are the implications of this work? Well one of the
observations that looms large in my field work is that although health and education are important,
they're not the topics that define most people's day-to-day realities and they're certainly not
the topics that Define their interactions with their mobile devices however these
persist as the topics that HCI4D designers and researchers and their funders want to address.
Underlying my speculative concepts are questions about whether or not this focus is misguided our
HCI4D design efforts focused on solving the right problems. Other practical implications of this
work include drawing attention to different design issues for the community to consider especially
those related to developing usable usable devices and interfaces. I also discuss alternative
technologies and interventions to consider and the limitations of using design to solve problems.
So there's one thing I hope you take away from this talk and that
is that HCI4D needs less attempts at problem solving and more speculation.
I want to thank my collaborators and Kenya as well as my collaborators at Michigan State uh this
work has been primarily funded by the National Science Foundation so thank you for your time.