Situating digital storytelling within African communities

Abstract

The authors reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. They demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed them to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging their prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, they uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, they distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a different community.