The design and evaluation of a photograph-sharing application for rural and urban Kenyan families

Abstract

Family members in Kenya rely on technology to connect between rural and urban regions, yet little is known about the specific communication challenges they face and how to overcome them through new communication technology design. To explore this topic, we conducted two studies along with design work. First, we conducted an interview-based study that explores how families in Kenya currently used communication technology and the social and technical challenges that they faced in doing so. Our findings showed that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, and the everyday coordination of activities, yet infrastructure challenges, reduced access to technology, and social situations created communication challenges. Second, we used these results to inform the design and deployment of a system called TumaPicha that supports the sharing of photographs between families who live in rural and low-income urban areas via intermediaries. The goal of the system was to support communication around economic activities while easing issues around connectivity and technology literacy. Third, TumaPicha was deployed over a period of 5 weeks with families in Kenya whose members inhabited both rural and low-income urban areas. Deployment results reveal that families used photographs to share knowledge related to subsistence awareness, village awareness, and health and well-being awareness. This suggests promise for simple media sharing applications in developing countries like Kenya that rely on a mixture of technology and social processes; however, our study also raises challenging questions around privacy and power consumption with new devices and applications.