This paper advances the study of batteries in everyday life. We provide a situated understanding of smartphone battery care based on a qualitative user study involving device logging and behavioral tracking to support our inquiry. Our findings depict how caring for batteries fits into everyday routines, the work that is done to prepare and maintain an infrastructure that supports mobile energy needs, and the ways in which batteries are monitored and preserved. Moreover, they illustrate what happens when everyday routines are disrupted and when planning or infrastructure fails, causing flat batteries and the need to apply mechanisms for coping. We build on these insights to propose shifting the research focus from user and device centric approaches towards more contextualized understandings of situated practices. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for two increasingly important topics within HCI, personal informatics and the Internet of Things (IoT).

With the wide penetration of mobile internet, social networking (SN) systems are becoming increasingly popular in the developing world. However, most SN sites are text heavy, and are therefore unusable by low-literate populations. Here we ask what would an SN application for low-literate users look like and how would it be used? We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. Over a four month deployment, 306 farmers registered through the phones of eight agricultural mediators making 514 posts and 180 replies. We conducted interviews with farmers and mediators and analyzed the content to understand system usage and to drive iterative design. The context of mediated use and agricultural framing had a powerful impact on system understanding (what it was for) and usage. Overall, KrishiPustak was useful and usable, but none-The-less we identify a number of design recommendations for similar SN systems.

Affordable mobile handsets and easier access to mobile internet has popularized the usage of existing social networking systems (SNSes) in the developing world. Most of these (E.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.) are text-heavy and do not work well for low-literate populations in resource constrained settings. We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. KrishiPustak has a text-free design, with all functionality represented by graphical icons. To support poor internet connectivity it also works in an offline mode. In this demo paper we discuss the motivations behind KrishiPustak, the design decisions we took and the development of the actual application. This demo is an abbreviated companion for a separate CSCW paper published in this conference [4].

This chapter investigates the potential of mobile technologies for Indigenous empowerment in the context of the Sami community, based on the example of an application for mobile devices that reveals a Sami linguistic landscape via augmented reality. Mobile technology is reshaping not only the media landscape, but also the way people can interact with the environmental landscape. The mobility is approached not only in terms of technological accessibility but also as a practice, i.e., in relation to uses and representations of place, space, and landscape. The potential of linguistic landscapes is emphasized in the problematization and investigation of the effects of public signs on language behaviour. Indigenous linguistic landscapes can contribute to ethnolinguistic vitality and to the strengthening of identity. The mobility of mobile technology can indeed reinforce the sense of place because it can function as a form of digital cartography and place-specific knowledge.

The role of technology in socio-economic development is at the heart of ICTD (ICTs for development). Yet, as with much Human Centered technology research, playful interactions with technology are predominantly framed around their instrumental roles, such as education, rather than their intrinsic value. This obscures playful activities and undermines play as a basic freedom. Within ICTD an apparent conflict is reinforced, opposing socio-economic goals with play, often dismissed as trivial or unaffordable. Recently a slow emergence of studies around play has led us to propose a framing of it as a capability, according to Amartya Sen, recognizing and examining its instrumental, constructive, and constitutive roles. We discuss how play unleashes a more honest and fair approach within ICTD, but most importantly, we argue how it is essentially a basic human need, not antithetical to others. We propose ways for the recognition and legitimization of the play activity in ICTD. 

This paper deals with the implications of the socialness of private communication. Drawing upon ethnographic observations of first time mobile phone users in Rah, an island in Vanuatu, we revisit the debate on how the mobile phone reconfigures private and personal communication. Our observations show how the advent of the mobile phone disrupts and challenges existing practices around how private communication is managed on the island. These observations are used to open up a design space where we explore the socialness of personal, private communication. Drawing on the analysis, we discuss three directions for future thinking of mobile interaction design: (1) designing for spatial awareness; (2) designing for transience and (3) designing with temporality. We expand on these to discuss the notion of digital patina, which we argue, is an exciting topic to explore for the design of personal, social communication.

The aim of this workshop is to unpack different ways of thinking about time, drawing a distinction between time as experienced, and time as counted by a ticking clock or measured by a computer algorithm. The concept of time is often taken for granted within HCI, yet high- lighting the assumptions that underpin it could provide a resource for research and innovation. In this extended abstract, we illustrate how this is so. 

We set out to explore and understand the ways in which mobiles made their way into an environment--Rah Island in Vanuatu--for the first time. We were struck by their playful use, especially given the very limited infrastructure and inexpensive devices that were available. Based on our findings, we discuss tensions between playfulness and utility, in particular relating to socio-economic benefits, and conclude that playfulness in these settings needs to be taken as seriously as in any other setting. Additionally, we formulated three challenges when designing for play in similar settings: (1) engage intimately with the materials of inexpensive ICT; (2) revisit design recommendations for playfulness to ensure that they can travel/translate into other cultures; and (3) alleviate existing tensions.

Since we started carrying mobiles phones, they have altered the ways in which we orient our bodies in the world. Many of those changes are invisible to us – they have become habits, deeply engrained in our society. To make us more aware of our bodily ways of living with mobiles and open the design space for novel ways of designing mobiles and their interactions, we decided to study one of the last groups of users on earth who had not been exposed to mobiles: the people of Vanuatu. As they had so recently started using mobiles, their use was still in flux: the fragility of the mo-bile was unusual to them as was the need to move in order to find coverage. They were still getting used to carrying their mobiles and keeping them safe. Their encounters with mobile use exposed the need to consider somaesthetics practices when designing mobiles as they profoundly affect our bodily ways of being in the world.