Designing digital storytelling for rural African communities

Abstract

This thesis situates digital storytelling in rural African communities to enable rural people to record and share their stories and to express their imaginations digitally. We explore the role of design and the methods and perspectives designers need to take on to design across cultures and to understand the forms and meanings behind rural African interpretations of digital storytelling. By integrating ethnographic insights with previous experiences of designing these kinds of systems, we implement a method using cell-phones to localize storytelling and involve rural users in design activities– probing ways to incorporate visual and audio media in storytelling. Our mobile digital storytelling system proved to be useable and useful, also allowing users to form their own interpretations of digital storytelling and (re)appropriate our system to alternative ends.