Devastating honesty in Marcus Duveskog’s research paper
I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.
That is a great societal motivation, hard context [!], and a good plan. At the moment Marcus is focusing on reporting his experiences with carrying out such a project. It happens to me only rarely that I see something like this in a research paper:
The contact hours with the students in the multimedia clubs were reduced for a number of reasons. For example, finding the person with the key to the lab took time, students were unexpectedly sent home when school run out of funds, or sessions collided with other events as important football games or a minister visiting the school.
This only is an example, his paper (currently under review) is full of such quotes. There are two great things about this. One is the down-to-earth honesty, putting things in way they did happen, in a way that the reader immediately catches the embarrassment and challenge the researcher had to undergo.
The other interesting issue here is that we (in the so called developed part of the world) are so used to comfortable settings of our design projects that we do not anymore realize that something like deciding whether the storage format of graphics should be vector or bitmap can be a difficult decision to make.
Tags: design, ict4d, research, user experience
Don’t forget to post back again when Marcus’s paper sees the light.
Kudos for tagging this post with “ict4d”: this is how I found it :)
:) nice that you work together :) . When you were in Africa haven’t you experience as well strong differences? . I am not saying there are good or bad, there are just differences that might trigger to reflect situations.
Imagine if we were exploring cases in Gaza or Myramar, the diference will be even greater. Well with the few things that I follow of different ethnographers, it makes me be thankful, because I have no idea of what I have.
What I am proud, and I agree totally with you, is the honesty and simple language of Marcus (haven’t read the paper, but for what you quote).
About your last paragraph, yes, we are “spoiled” but we are in that specific “pink sphere”. Inclusive in Europe you can find sectors of the population that does not understand the concept of “right and left click” of the mouse (proved). They are minority, perhaps yes. What I want to say, each region of the world has different challenges without a doubt but those challenges can be also advantages. You know how valuable is that they actually ask and want to reflect which one is the difference between “formats” because they do not give it as fact. In comparison others might do it automatically, without knowing the reason why, just know that it should be in that way.
Who knows, just to entertain the mind….
It got through: ACM IDC 2009. We got seven(!) reviews, splitting the board of reviewers into love/hate groups. More info soon.
Who else will boost up your own work than you yourself? So here we go: the ACM IDC seems to be a high-profile conference, judging from the email we got from the organizers: “Dear IDC Author,
we are finalizing the IDC 2009 program, which includes a set of exciting workshops, two prestigious keynotes, and a fantastic set of high quality presentations of:
- 17 full papers (selected from 53 submissions)
- 30 short papers (selected from 82 submissions)
- 12 demos (selected from 20 submissions)”
Now, 32% acceptance rate is quite good, what do you think? (But still twice the ACM CHI).
And to finish the loop, the paper is now available online at ACM Portal.
Great Roman that you advertise our paper. Must say it has been a great conference here in Como with so many interesting presentations. Glad I made it here and thanks for your great contributions for that.