Meraka Institute

Principal Researcher, Enterprise Knowledge Engineering and Management

Other Affiliations: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment and Information Technology

Principal Researcher

About

Since 2003 I have focused on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Design for rural contexts and knowledge practices that contrast with those that typify technology-design. This has enabled me to work with Aboriginal communities in Australia and in villages in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique, to live in technology-sparse, often incredibly beautiful, 'natural' environments and learn from the wisdom of the land, as i engage with the footsteps of its people.

Most of my peer-reviewed publications relate to designing interactions with mobile devices, information systems and simulated-3D environments that suit the needs of inhabitants of, and visitors to, rural and often impoverished or geographically remote places.

*Designing for Envelopment*
My attitude to interactions is that i seek to design with a mind for ‘envelopment’, a term coined by Michael Christie to express the use of technology to strengthen and extend local, cultural processes. This motivates my belief that technology will only be useful, and sustainable, if design responds to local ways of being, doing and saying and pursues a “located accountability". So I spend extended periods in rural places, with rural communities and use ethnographic and participatory strategies in my work. The irony is not lost on me that i can (and do) own the domain name HCI4ENVELOPMENT.

*The Peripatetics of my (non-dualist) Mind-Body-Setting*
Apparently Generation-X'ers are characterized by their adaptability, perhaps euphemistically. I have studied, researched and/or lectured at Universities of Stirling, London, Sussex and Cambridge in the UK and the Australian National, Queensland, Charles Darwin and James Cook Universities in Australia and at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. I interleaved education and research with extensive travel and prolonged periods living in the Middle East, Cambodia, Greece and Africa. Indeed, i spent the first few years of my life in Sudan and have been a 3rd Culture Kid ever since. My epistemological pedigree is no less diverse: Honours in Biology and Psychology; PhD in neurophysiology (1992); and, Masters in IT (2001).

These days i am interested in re-inverting, so the 'pathways along which [my] life is lived' are turned from 'the boundaries within which it is enclosed'. i have (rather clumsily) begun by thinking about how we can 'do' rural landscape in design, rather than perform on it. i am much inspired by Tim Ingold's writings. i am incredibly privileged at the moment: my manager and CSIR-Meraka supports me to work most of the time in situ in the remote Wild Coast of South Africa's Eastern Cape and in Omahake in the Kalhari in Namibia. i hope i pass on my privilege by facilitating local community members to lead our local research endevours.

At this stage such pursuits seem boundaries away from the end of the 1980s when i was an experimental biologist. Much less able to embrace ambiguity as i modeled optomotor processing in honeybees using neurophyisological and behavioural biology tools (such as testing honeybee trajectories with sinusoidal gratings and air-puffs). It would be nice  to place the Nature paper that my PhD and early post-doc work culminated in within some other context than 'looks good on the CV'.
Working with African people in rural villages may also seem boundaries away from 2005 when i was Deputy Head of the School of IT or when i established the Games Design Programme at James Cook University. However, this position did enable me to do somethings i learned much from, one of which was to establish (with the support of my Indigenous colleagues) the first panel on Indigenous Led Digital Enterprise in Australia’s leading forum for HCI, when i hosted OZCHI2008 in Cairns. If you are interested in this type of journey, please consider keeping an eye on our forthcoming conference in Namibia, in November: http://www.iktc2011.org/  We don't claim to have the answers, but we do hope that raising our heads above the sand will make us visible to those who can guide our journey.