Situated interactions between audiovisual media and African herbal lore

Abstract

The authors describe a rural African community’s interactions in recording and interpreting video on herb lore in our endeavours to design digital systems that extend sharing knowledge in a system of traditional medicine (TM). Designing for such a system involves reflecting on own narratives about medicine and media and recognising that narratives reflect ‘‘cultural logics’’ and media transforms narratives. The authors used video as sites to explore meaning-making in herb lore; anchor our dialogic with, and about users; and, elicit design ideas. Participants’ prioritise speech, gesture and bodily interaction, above other visual context. Further, recordings can embody nuances in social relations and depict temporal patterns that are integral to TM pedagogy. However, such embodiments and depictions are disrupted by affordances of, and associations with, media; our abstraction; and, non-local ontologies (such as chronologic or geographic point-based representation). The authors' insights produce new design patterns by orienting us towards representing herb lore within the social-relational spaces that contextualise knowing, doing and moving, linked to corporeal and felt-experiences. More generally, uncovering transformations when media and narrative interact can improve analysis and designing for logics and literacies that profoundly differ from those typifying ubicomp.