Hi, good afternoon, and welcome to today's IPAT-GVU lunch lecture. My name is Michael Best. I'm executive director of the Institute for People and Technology, and I'm really glad to be hosting Professor Susan Weish this afternoon for a talk that I'm sure is going to be really, really interesting. Next week, lunch lecture, is Haoqi Zhang, who will be presenting on computational ecosystems. Ecosystems or ecosystems? I generally go with ecosystems. Let's have, by a show of hands, how many people go with ecosystems? Okay. Computational ecosystems, advancing human values through integrative computing and changing practice. So please do come next week, same time, same place. Does anyone need to leave at 1.20 because you have to be somewhere at 1.30? You. You. So at 1.20 we'll take a beat and please do leave but otherwise the presentation with Q&A will go to 1.30 and as a matter of respect for the speaker and the rest of us don't be please getting up and loudly. exiting in the middle of Q&A, capisce? Okay, it's really my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Susan Weish, a colleague, a friend who I've known since she was, a PhD student here at Georgia Tech. We were just talking and I think we maybe overlapped about four or so years here at Georgia Tech and I always remembered two things. One is that she was doing work that I thought was just sort of one of those, wait, is that allowed? Can you do this? Studies of digital spiritualism and religion. And the other thing is that Susan's a really good designer. You're a good designer. And so she would do some sort of exploratory kind of HCI, human-centered design activity, but everything would just look great, like totally professionally done. And I was so jealous of that design skill. After graduating from Georgia Tech, she went on to Michigan State University, where she is currently associate professor in the Department of Media and Information and a faculty affiliate of their university's African Studies Center. Her research focuses on HCI and ICTD, and for nearly two decades, she sought to understand how people in Africa use ICTs and design technologies that reflect their contexts, critically examine whether ICTs support socioeconomic development, and increase African participation in technology design and research. And to manage these questions, she's conducted extensive field work in Kenya since 2007. And so there's two other things I'd like to mention about Susan's scholarship. One is that it's this consistent investment in Kenya and in relationships and in communities that I really admire in the work. That she's put in now 20 years, basically, 19 years, I guess. In the same part of the world, working on these questions, building trust, building understanding, learning Ki Swahili, and that kind of commitment, I think, is just so admirable. A second thing that I find very interesting, and I wonder if we're going to have any taste of this today, is you have these kind of questions. You often answer them in the negative. So you might be saying, like, will this agriculture information system help these folks in some place in Kenya, and sometimes the setup kind of leads you to think that the end result is going to be, yes, of course, it's great, but I think in your scholarship, your point is not so much. So I think that that's really an interesting part of your work. So, please, without further ado, Dr. Weitsch. Thank you, Mike. So, thank you, Mike, for that very generous introduction. I'm Susan Weitsch. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. It's wonderful to be back at Georgia Tech. I want to thank Priscilla for all the work that she's done to host me today. And today I'm going to describe how accompaniment or an approach to research that broadly prioritizes relationships over research outcomes can benefit human-centered approaches to technology development. And I fully realize that Carl DeSalvo gave a talk about this same topic just last semester. And it's a genuine, a truly genuine coincidence that we've both arrived at this idea and how it might apply to design in our work. I'd like to think that my work builds on Carl's ideas, like Mike said, drawing from my long-term fieldwork in Kenya and bringing a sort of global perspective to this topic. At the end of this talk, I hope you'll appreciate how human-centered design can be used to support longer-lasting and more meaningful outcomes that aren't necessarily digital technologies. So I'll begin with an outline for my talk. I'll tell you a little bit more about me and my research. I'll give a very brief explanation of human-centered design, this popular approach to technology development. and I'll primarily focus on critiques of this approach. And then I'll argue that accompaniment offers a way to address these critiques by drawing attention to different outcomes that are not necessarily technological interventions. And to do this, I'll talk about two projects. The first is where we used human-centered design to collaborate with Kenyan youth to develop an intervention to support type 1 diabetes self-management. The second project is another one where human-centered design was central. It's part of the Mozilla Responsible Computing Program. This is a program that supported the redesign and implementation of an HCI course so that it centers Africans' perspectives. This is a course that I developed and have taught at Michigan State where students collaborate with their peers from Kenya's Egerton University on a design project. project. I'll discuss what connects both of these projects. I'll talk about how accompaniment can reshape what we think about as outcomes and design, and the broader implications for research and also how we teach human computer interaction. So a little bit more about me. I mean, since I've graduated, I've continued to work in the field of human computer interaction. Also, I know Mike from working in the field of information, communication, technology, and development, a field that's broadly defined as how technologies can be appropriately designed to address users' needs and to support socioeconomic development in so-called developing regions. And, you know, I think Mike can attest to this too. Over the course of our careers, it's been really exciting to see growth in these studies that could be characterized as ICTD in our field. They're incredibly valuable for broadening researchers' knowledge of how to design technology for contexts that are outside of North America and Europe or those more commonly studied in the field. And really useful for providing us with a global understanding of technology design and use. I don't want to knock this over. And like Mike said, my work has contributed to these fields in these ways. I've done a number of qualitative studies examining mobile phones, social media use, even agricultural hand tools, mostly in Africa, and use findings from these studies to offer really practical guidance on how to improve the design of these technologies for this context. I also use my findings to raise really critical questions about whether or not technology can actually support socioeconomic development, and I've also been deeply committed to diversifying perspectives within computing and design fields by increasing African participation in them. To do this work, I almost entirely conduct fieldwork in Kenya and East Africa, primarily in the rural areas, like you see in the picture here. I first began working in Kenya as a PhD student here at Georgia Tech, and since then I've been returning regularly. I typically travel there twice a year. Over time, I've developed an intermediate proficiency in speaking Kiswahili. I'm also very fortunate to have a very talented instructor and like Mike said and I think this is worth saying again the sustained long-term engagement with the people in places in the country has deeply benefited my research it's allowed me to build trust develop meaningful collaborations and gain a much deeper understanding of this context and I ultimately believe these long-term commitment, has helped me conduct research that's more ethical, that's more grounded and responsive to the communities I work with. Also happens to be, it has been, and it continues to be an exciting place to study technology. It's a place that's very much at the forefront of technology use. From the development and use of mobile money systems, notably M-PMASE, that are fully integrated into everyday life there, to using WhatsApp to share crop prices and organize digital Harambes, which are these community fundraising events where everybody chips in money. And it's these innovations that have emerged from this context that eventually find their ways to other parts of the world. And over the course of my career, I really adopted this radically interdisciplinary approach to research. I've worked closely with students and scholars from geography, anthropology, computer science, linguistics, even soil science in Kenya and at Michigan State to do this research. And a few projects. I've developed educational videos that help rural women in western Kenya learn how to use their mobile phones to access health information and agricultural information. I've worked with smallholder farmers also in Western Kenya to redesign the agricultural hand tools they use. This is called a djembe in Kiswahili. Finally, working with students, I've designed and evaluated systems in these contexts. This is a system called ImKulinda. It's a domestic security system designed for rural African households. You can see from the picture here that it's solar powered. many of these homes are off their country's electricity grids. There's a sensor based in there. When the sensor field is broken, an alert is sent to the user letting them know that somebody has come into their compound. And we've evaluated these and other sensor based systems at homes in Kenya and in Malawi. So these projects, like many in the HCI and ICTD fields, has been guided by this human-centered design approach. I'm not gonna spend too much time explaining this to this audience, but it's an approach to technology development that involves putting people, their context, and their activities at the center of the design process. It generally has these three phases that you see here, this understanding the people you're designing for, this sort of ideation, brainstorming prototype, and then evaluating whatever it is that you've designed to see if it has the impact that you hoped it would. And, of course, human-centered design has been highly influential in the field of human-computer interaction. And now there's a tremendous amount for using it in other fields. Artificial intelligence, international development, public health. But as interest in human-centered design has grown, there are also these critiques of the approach that have emerged. And these critiques raise really important questions about whether the technological innovations that are frequently the outcomes of human-centered design, thinking about mobile phone applications, actually solve the problems that they are intended to. Scholars argue that the social change embodied in these innovations, such as improved access to health care or educational opportunities, rarely occur. building on this Dory Tunstall makes a very compelling case that this is a process that tends to benefit Western design and technology companies more so than the actual communities that participate in these projects finally Christina Harrington and her colleagues argue that human-centered design is an approach to developing that prioritizes developing novel technologies over deeply understanding the communities under study. They add that there's an opportunity for designers and technologists to expand their conversations about what outcomes are considered good design. And I think this is really important, and I want to say it again. They make a case that there's an opportunity for technologists and designers to broaden what they consider good design. So this brings me to what I'm going to talk about today. These critiques are valuable, and they have certainly forced me to do a tremendous amount of soul-searching about my own work, and I've concluded that this accompaniment approach can provide a meaningful response to these critiques. So what is it? Accompaniment started in liberation theology in Latin America, where faith groups learned to walk alongside the communities they were fighting for, for justice, instead of simply offering top-down help. Paul Farmer, a noted anthropologist and doctor, later brought the idea into global health and demonstrated how health care could only succeed if it was built with and sustained by communities. In research, accompaniment really isn't a method. It's more of a mindset, and you can use it to guide how you use methods. Use the methods to shape the relationships you build. the relationships you build, and how you determine success in research. And within technology design, it means shifting away from these quick fixes towards approaches that are deeply grounded in listening, mutual understanding, and working towards long-term impact. And I want to argue that it's an approach that can complement human-centered design research in HCI fields, Especially for the ways that it emphasizes, and again, these are ideas I'm very much borrowing from Carl DeSalvo, Carl's work. The way it forces you to relinquish control and turning the gaze on us. And by that, I mean HCI researchers, students, et cetera. So I'm gonna walk you through what this looks like in the rest of my talk. And this brings me to the first project I wanna discuss. Here we used human-centered design to work with Kenyan youth and their caregivers to develop an intervention to support their self-management of type 1 diabetes. This is an ongoing project that was originally funded by the National Institutes of Health. It's done in collaboration with faculty at Michigan State and in the spirit of accompaniment, done with an NGO in Nairobi called Rural Outreach Africa who I've worked with on a number of projects, as well as the Kenya Diabetes Management and Information Center, or DMI for short. This project was supported by an NIH program that was aimed at developing innovative mobile health interventions. And you can see this is sort of the information about the program and the project that you can find on the NIH's website. An interest in this topic has been motivated by increased access to mobile phones in Kenya and other low and middle income countries, primarily because of this perception that they can be used to help marginalized groups access health information. We did not develop a mobile phone app. Instead, by relinquishing control of what the NIH wanted, it supported a different, and I would argue a more compelling an unexpected outcome that includes this paper-based logbook or diary that you see in the picture here. So just a little background, why focus on type 1 diabetes? One reason is that people with type 1 diabetes is rising, and it continues to rise, especially among adolescents or people between the years of 10 and 19, and especially in low- and middle-income countries. And I understand that a lot of the early work at the intersection of diabetes and technology has been done at Georgia Tech and continues to be done here. But just as a quick reminder, type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition where your body can't produce enough insulin. Managing type 1 of diabetes includes monitoring blood sugar levels, injecting insulin multiple times a day, adhering to a balanced diet and exercise routine, and regularly meeting with healthcare providers. Living with type 1 diabetes can be challenging anywhere, and I imagine that you can probably appreciate that it's especially challenging in countries like Kenya due to limited healthcare resources, economic barriers that make it difficult to access insulin and other supplies that you need, as well as what you could call these sort of cultural factors. There's a Sigma that surrounds having type 1 diabetes. A little bit more background, we focused on youth because this is a very important developmental stage for developing the habits that will help you live with diabetes throughout the course of your life. And again, in the spirit of an accompaniment, this is very much a long-term project between Michigan State University, DMI, as well as a really, really talented Kenyan design team. The project began in September of 2019. It was delayed for about a year and a half because of the COVID pandemic. But since then, over the course of the project, we've had five engagements in Kenya between the research design team and roughly 50 participants the last meeting was in June of last year and it's worth noting that this work has taken place in an urban and rural area the rural area in Vahiga which is close to Lake Victoria and it's important to recognize you know there are vast differences in terms of employment opportunities access to health care infrastructure between urban places like Nairobi and the more rural areas like in Vahiga. So we followed a very typical textbook human-centered design process. It was very qualitative in nature. I think qualitative research is especially conducive for developing relationships and research. Data collected over the course of the study primarily included interviews, pages and pages of field notes, as well as artifacts created by participants, design sketches, photographs. And as is typical in human-centered design, we began with this understanding or formative research phase with this ultimate goal of learning as much as we can about the people and the context that we're designing for. Here we use interviews and observations. We went to participants' homes to conduct these. Again, this is fairly typical in HCD. It's my colleague, Jenny Olson, who conducted the interviews. And by going to people's homes, it was not only useful for collecting people's data, but really respecting their lived realities and meeting them where they are. We asked them questions about their diagnosis, their everyday lives, their relationships, the food they ate. We learned about the improvised insulin storage units that they developed. Again, many of these households are off their country's electricity grid. Insulin needs to be kept cool and there's no limited access to refrigeration. We talked about using glucometers. And given the NIH's focus on mHealth, we asked people a lot of questions about their mobile phones, access, ownership, and what they use them for. So this data was really useful for collecting information about the users that we were designing for, but it also helps sort of lay the foundation between the research team and the participants that's really extended over the course of the project. Other methods that we use that I think it's safe to say are a little less typical in HCI and more popular in fields like public health are this photo study method. And again, it involved giving participants cameras, asking them to take photographs. We followed it up with interviews. And again, this is something that's very much aligned with this accompaniment approach because it's about giving participants, letting them tell their own stories and research and providing us with a deeper insight into their everyday lives that isn't always available with interviews and observations. Briefly talk about what we found, there's sort of a tension here. Again, unlike traditional approaches to research, accompaniment is really about emphasizing relationships over research findings, but it's hard to give a talk and not talk about your findings. And, you know, unsurprisingly, we found that managing type 1 diabetes in Kenya is hard. Insulin and supplies are often scarce, they're unaffordable. In rural areas, like I've mentioned, there's no reliable refrigeration, which makes it very difficult to keep insulin cool. Food insecurity makes it incredibly difficult to control your blood sugar levels. And again, there's a Sigma about the condition, misunderstandings that type 1 diabetes is contagious, and it's not. And again, there's more information about this in the publication. But I think more importantly when analyzing this data when coding and listening to participants interviews looking at their photos and listening to their stories it was useful for deeply understanding their perspectives and recognizing that a mobile phone app was not going to address their challenges. And again in the spirit of accompaniment I'm gonna let one of the participants in our studies explain why this is the case. This is a short video from Anne. She has a son named Louis who's been managing type 1 diabetes for 15 years now and she does a tremendous job of explaining the challenges with using a mobile device to support type 1 diabetes management. This is about four minutes long. Practice this. Tim I don't know I don't want to unplug this but I I don't know, this worked and we tested it for something funny going on now. There are cheaper providers like telecom, we could make a deal to solve that, but still it would be a problem to many people. The cost of a smartphone, for you to have an app, you will need a smartphone. You will need a couple of thousands of shillings to purchase one. So, maybe if we solve this issue, we could come up with the government to provide the spirals which is which is very ambitious but uh the the causes um an issue the other issue is um not everybody knows actually that one especially in the rural areas they only know how to pick they make a mother in all the jobs and i don't know she can just pick it um so the the literacy because a bit of it could be an issue, but it could be solved with training and maybe figuring around network in remote areas is problematic. There are some places where you go, you know, nobody will get you on board unless now you start changing a network, another network, but still you're not available full time. then accessibility in schools. Our issue is the youth. Like my son is in Syria, but how will he use his school? So it could be an issue, but then our group suggested that if your youth has an analytic issue, then we need to strike or to have a policy that they can leave the phone with the nurse so that we can be monitoring the app. And you will So there are a number of things that are going on in this video. You know, Anne clearly knows what people need, you know, free access to smartphones. She also does a wonderful job of articulating all of the challenges with mobile phones, not being able to use them. You know, and Mike introduced me by saying I sort of have a negative take on these technological interventions, but it's worth noting that everything that Anne is describing has more or less persisted, particularly in rural areas, for the past 15 years that I've studied mobile phones in rural parts of Kenya. But, you know, coming back to my talk, mHealth efforts are predicated on this idea that you own a mobile phone and that you're able to consistently use it. You know, that's clearly not the case in Kenya, and Ann does an excellent job of detailing why. So after completing this formative research, it really became clear that we had to change our direction and in terms of accompanying accompaniment it meant relinquishing control to let go of the expectations of how the project might turn out or how we spelled it out in our application to the NIH it gave us an opportunity to use these grant resources in very different ways and by letting go of this anticipated outcome it provided space for what I think are more impactful outcomes to emerge. So to arrive at these outcomes and again this is very typical in human centered design we held we engaged in this ideation phase where we generated creative ideas and potential solutions that centered on users needs and insights. We continued to collaborate with the same youth and caregivers that were in our interview phase of the project and at this point the project we also involved our very talented Kenyan design team. So we held two day-and-a-half long workshops, hotels in Vejiga and in Nairobi, and of course we paid for participants transportation, provided them with per diems and meals during these sessions. So I want to return to this photo study method and how it was especially aligned with accompaniment in the way that it seemed to build community and shared understanding among everyone involved in our project. Both design workshops followed a similar protocol. After introductions, we asked participants to explain their photos from the earlier phase, and you can see some of those photos here. So when we were at the workshops, we asked the youth and their caregivers to talk about their pictures, they talked about using their glucometers, injecting insulin, eating food, and exercising. all of the activities that were really crucial to their well-being. They shared selfies and reflected on some of the more challenging aspects of managing type 1 diabetes, such as the pain that comes with injecting yourself with insulin every day, as well as some of the more positive moments of, you know, successfully managing their blood sugar levels or simply living with the condition for a number of years. But this activity of sharing and discussing the photos was useful for a couple of things. for confirming a number of the findings from the earlier phases of our research and more significantly motivating discussions among our participants, the youth and their parents. And they talked about their shared experience and realized they weren't the only people managing type one diabetes. It sort of built solidarity and a sense of community, especially among the youth and caregivers, but also among the research and design team that were also in attendance at these workshops. I think an important thing to keep in mind is that most of these participants had never met anybody else with type 1 diabetes before our project. So this trust and some intimacy seemed to support the project's next phases. And that's where we asked participants to generate a collection of ideas. We asked participants to sketch their ideas, to help support diabetes self-management, This gave them an active role in shaping the design rather than researchers coming in and telling them what they need. I love drawing. I think it's a wonderful way to make abstract ideas tangible. It helps participants express their perspectives in ways that might be hard to put in words. It also fosters a shared sense of ownership around ideas and strengthens both voice and community in the design process. And you can see a few of those drawings here. So there was one concept that appeared over and over in both the rural and urban workshops. And it was this idea for a diary or a logbook. And when discussing this concept, groups consistently talked about how it could simultaneously address a number of needs. It could be used to remind them of their doctor's appointments, to document the foods they ate and how much insulin they were injecting. It could also be used as a tool to help others learn about type 1 diabetes. And unlike an mHealth app, it didn't require owning a smartphone or having internet access. this idea of relinquishing control. So at this point in the project, our Kenyan design team and collaborators really ran with things. After over a three month period, they took the sketches that had emerged from our workshop, turned them into three initial versions of the diary, and then developed a final prototype of the diary that you see here on the screen. And all of this is documented in a paper if you want to learn more about it. So the final phase of the human-centered design process, the sort of implementation or formative evaluation phase. We did this in two parts. The first involved bringing study participants back together for another workshops at the same hotel. So I mean I'm getting ahead of myself. So we did the evaluation in two phases. The first was a more conventional formative evaluation that you see in human-centered design where we evaluated the diary with participants. And the second one was a little less common. We brought participants back together again to really ask them to sort of evaluate and reflect on their experience of participating in this human-centered design process. So again, there's this tension here. I really wanna emphasize how accompaniment is an approach to research that prioritizes relationships over reporting findings. At the same time, I feel very much compelled to share sort of the outcomes of our research. So we asked participants to engage in this sort of usability test with the prototype. We gave them the diary to use over a month long period. We did a pre and post survey to see what happened with it. After analyzing the data, we generally found that participants' reaction to the diary was positive. They commented on the diary's attractive appearance. You can see here there is a real appreciation for having illustrations of foods that they ate. Also information that was very important to their context, such as developing these improvised insulin storage units using clay pots and charcoal. And there was evidence from our surveys that our participants did use it every day over a month-long period. We also gained a tremendous amount of information on how to improve the design of the diary. And so there was a general sense that this was a feasible idea and of course we clearly need to conduct more research to see what if any outcome this has on health outcomes, what impact it might have. So like I said we also returned to Kenya in April of 2023 to sort of evaluate participants experiences in the project and this is where my understanding of these other outcomes really began to emerge. So seven months following our evaluation of the diary many things happened over that time period and you can see that in the picture here. We presented the final version of our diary to the final version of our diary was presented to our participants. This is an event held in Vahiga County. You can see the the county governor and ministry of health was at this event. We held other events. This is an event called a Heroes Lunch, where type 1 diabetes champions or people who advocate and support others with type 1 diabetes came together. You can see that with the cake here. Finally, our collaborator, Eric Omonde, was featured on a local TV station where he talked about the project and the impact it had. And again, this seemed useful for sort of educating people about type 1 diabetes. And in terms of evaluation, it was these experiences which seemed most impactful, more so than developing the actual diary. And again, more relevant to my broader argument, by prioritizing these outcomes which were not necessarily the focus of our original project. So when returning to evaluating participants' experiences in the workshop, we were evaluating participants' experience in the project. We We asked participants to reflect on their experience and write them down on the comment cards that you see here. And again, it was these experiences that were most impactful. And also some surprising ones. Participants frequently talked about the camera that we gave them in the early stages of the study, and many of them continued to use it for all kinds of purposes. The caregivers, who were overwhelmingly women, consistently talked about enjoying being able to stay in a hotel, having somebody else cook their meals. There was sort of a sense that some dignity came with being in this project and being included in the research. And finally, the most consistent thing that came out of the workshop was just making friends. Community building among the youth with type 1 diabetes seemed to emerge as a significant outcome of our project. Participants have created WhatsApp groups and exchanged personal experiences, they continued to support each other after the workshops ended and many of them described again this is the most significant outcome of the project so accompaniment does call for this long term sustained relationships and this past June we met with our participants again this is roughly three years following the beginning of the project. We brought participants back together, continued to explore their experiences being in the project, also had conversations with them about how to sustain the project, and it's been really exciting to watch them grow up. Many of them are in college now, and again our collaborators continued to sort of be running with the project. A few months ago I learned that they had received money from Novo Nordisk or in the process of putting 20,000 copies of the diary to distribute. In terms of my own work I've submitted a proposal to the NIH to more systematically evaluate the impact of the diary but it's unclear what's going to happen with that. So just quickly before I discuss you know sort of the takeaways from this research I wanted to show another image of the diary. I think it's a really beautiful well-designed artifact that speaks to how human-centered design can work and really is a credit to our deeply talented Kenyan design team. Okay, so sort of what are the takeaways from this? Coming back to this broader idea of accompaniment and relinquishing control, I deeply believe it allows for us to have a more authentic human-centered design process, one that embraces ambiguity and not assuming that a technical intervention is the right outcome. In a lot of ways, I think the NIH and the reviewers got things wrong. Strictly speaking, you can't anticipate what's going to happen in human-centered design, so it seemed a little off to have this baked into our project that a mobile phone application would be the outcome. And again, you know, emphasizing that this design process, using it as a way to learn about each other and support relationships, can be more impactful and will likely be much more long-lasting than the technological intervention. I think this makes a strong case for why we can need to continue to integrate more visual methods into HCI and ICTD research. And finally, and this last one can be a little hard to swallow as a researcher, accompaniment demands flexibility and adaptation and putting aside your personal interests and ambitions. So I don't know if I'll be able to evaluate this diary but recognizing that there's a tremendous amount of success for me stepping away from the project and giving it to our local to our Kenyan collaborators to run with. So at the time that I have left, what brings me to the second project I want to discuss and it's the development implementation of this technology design course. And here I want to demonstrate how accompaniment can shape how we teach HCI. This is a project that's been funded by the Mozilla Foundation, in particular their Responsible Computing Challenge. This is a program that supports the conceptualization, development, and piloting of curricula that empowers students to think about the social and political context of computing. It is a fantastic program. I can't speak highly enough about working with the Mozilla Foundation. And I know that they've supported some projects here at Georgia Tech. And here I want to demonstrate how accompaniment can really upend how we teach HCI and ICTD. Courses that are generally meant to train computer and information science students to design technologies that solve problems in developing countries. And this is an approach that reproduces this narrative that Africans are technologically backwards, lack innovation, and only use technology instead of developing it. And in my proposal, I suggested that we do this by incorporating topics from the field of African studies into HCI. So again, this is basically a course where you have HCI plus African studies. And African studies is a really exciting discipline that's sort of an umbrella for all of these topics that are important. Colonialism, multilingualism, resource constraints, gender, race, etc. So there are many things that motivated this idea. I think the most influential are my experiences teaching a week-long human-centered design course at Kenya's Egerton University. I've done this for the last four summers now. Michigan State and Egerton have worked together for nearly 50 years. They're both agricultural institutions. There are a number of research and exchange programs between the universities. And what stands out most from these experiences is how creative and how thoughtful the students' technology design projects are. They consider its topics like sustainability, privacy, misinformation, access, because these are issues that deeply affect them in ways that seem a little less obvious to the students who are largely socialized in the United States. You know I teach a similar version of this human-centered design course and I'm constantly reminded of how much can be learned from these students and their perspectives. So again this idea of incorporating these perspectives into an HCI course was really central to this idea. There are other ways that I did this. I'm clearly not African. I co-taught the course with an African studies scholar. This is Dr. Chodi, who is a linguistics professor at Michigan State. We assigned readings that were written by African scholars about technology and design, in particular ones that sought to sort of change this narrative that Africa is sort of the recipient of technology designed in Silicon Valley, but that there's a lot of innovation taking place in the continent. We invited the authors from these, authors of these texts to speak in our class and have conversations with students about the assigned readings and see my colleague Dr. Komen from Daystar University sort of joining our class. And then we engage in this human centered design project. Students identified a research challenge, conducted research, brainstorm ideas and then prototyped it see a paper prototype there and again all of this was done in collaboration with students at Egerton University and what I'm most proud of and I think one of the central features of this idea was the development of a program I called technologists in residence so we had five students and one faculty member from Kenya's Egerton University they were selected through a competitive process they received a stipend and laptop to really recognize their expertise and their contributions to this class. They participated in the class online for most of the semester via Zoom and then they traveled to Michigan and see us all at the Detroit Airport there and these students acted as mentors you know they weren't sort of passive participants in the class but they took a very active role in mentoring the Michigan State students over the course of the semester as they worked on their design projects. Just quickly, the first iteration of this course, highly interdisciplinary, we teach it one day a week for two and a half hours which has benefits and drawbacks. Navigating the eight-hour time difference is always a challenge, but a lot of the sort of findings that I talked about here come from build notes that I took following each class and there's a paper about this as well. So again the goal was sort of to upend these traditional ICT course and challenge this idea that we need to design technology interventions to address problems in other parts of the world. And a lot of the class was devoted to simply talking to one another and introducing sort of everyday life in Kenya to the Michigan State students. One of the most simple, straightforward and effective ways I did this was by developing this day-in-the-life exercise. Kenyan students created PowerPoint presentations that walked the MSU students through a typical day from the time they wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night. Their presentations included lots of pictures. Their stories that detailed their everyday routines, what they ate, how they prepared their food, sort of the multilingual realities of their life, using English in the classroom, Swahili on campus, and then their mother tongue language at home. And I mean, many of us have been teachers in a classroom. There are very few instances where I've just observed students be so engaged and so captivated by what they're watching on the screen than during these presentations. So, of course, they found contrast between the Kenyan students and their own lives. Most aren't speaking multiple language. There's a tendency to eat more processed food in the United States than in Kenya. But they also found a lot of commonalities, you know, a love for playing video games, navigating how to work a job and balance school. So these and other activities seem successful in sort of breaking down the stereotype as African as other. For having conversations over the course of the semester and created space for some vulnerability and openness to discuss topics that can sometimes be difficult to talk about in the classroom. We talked a great deal about the impacts of colonialism. Kenyan students talked about how this continued to impact their lives. They talked about naming practices and how they don't typically go by the names of Jim and Paul. They use these names instead of their indigenous names. They described how their parents' and grandparents' land was taken during British colonial rule. There were lots of discussions about the differences in cost of living between Kenya and the United States. Of course, in Kenya, things tend to be a lot less expensive. And again, relevant to technology, we had guest speakers who talked about infidelity and plural marriage and how this shaped women's mobile phone use. And these conversations were also reciprocal. It created a space for the Kenyan students to ask questions to the Michigan State students. And we devoted a significant amount of class time to just explaining how what the Kenyan students sometimes see on television and in movies aren't necessarily reflective of reality in the United States. So these and other discussions also affected the students design projects. Classes were devoted to engaging in critiquing of ideas where the Kenyan students played significant role. When Michigan State students proposed something like a mobile phone app you know they quickly said most people in rural areas don't have smartphones. They talked about some of the challenges with accessing the internet in rural areas. Lots of discussions over what languages to use and the implications of those choices. So again this brings me to another aspect of accompaniment that's relevant to how we design interventions in HCI and ICTD. It seemed like the course was useful for sort of turning the gaze on us, and what do I mean by that? It seemed like through the course the students working together as partners, they had these repeated engagements with the Kenyan students via Zoom and also via WhatsApp. It helped them sort of realize these weren't people to study or to be designed for, but seemed to push them to first reflect on their own positionality. I mean, many of these students have socialized in the American Midwest and to deeply reconsider where expertise and technological innovation comes from. Again, these are two things I really hope to achieve with the course. They really seem to move away from this mindset of helping someone or studying someone and learn how it might be more effective to actually design and work together. So again, similar to the findings of my other projects, I'm not going to spend too much time going over all the outcomes. I have a student who's developed a really beautiful website that details every aspect of the class, including the projects, the assignments, the syllabus. If you teach an HCI class, I encourage you to look at this. and again the takeaways here I think there are a couple um again incorporating this accompaniment mindset into the class I think was successful in sort of challenging how we more traditionally teach HCI and ICTD the course seems successful of course you know there are opportunities to continue evaluating it but I think one of the most important things that I've taken away from it is that you know Africa is typically thought of sort of peripheral or maybe you have one class to it or you have a separate class it's about technology use in developing countries but I think there are a lot of opportunities that might come from making Africa more central to how we teach human computer interaction and at least provides opportunities for different types of outcomes you know not just a piece of technology for your portfolio but learning how to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and sort of this global understanding of technology use that I think is increasingly important for designers to have. I also want to add that, of course, some aspects of doing this project demand resources, particularly, you know, bringing the Kenyan students to the United States. But a lot of the things that we did are pretty accessible and I think there's a case to be made for integrating these into more courses. so I'm beginning to wrap things up so you know one of the limitations of accompaniment is how do you sustain it and that's very much where I am now last year around this time I had a pretty significant grant from the U.S. State Department it provided an opportunity to really grow this program grow the technologists and residents program have an exchange program that would also take Michigan State students to travel to Kenya to evaluate their projects we were going to have a big project showcase at the embassy in Nairobi. And then almost a year ago to the day, I got a letter from Marco Rubio saying that this was not aligned with the government's priorities. And they clawed back every last cent of money that they had given to Michigan State and that the project came to a halt. This is one of many projects at Michigan State that's lost funding. And, you know, it has multiple types of impacts, including really eroding the trust that I've Spent years developing with my colleagues at Egerton University because it meant we couldn't pay them. More broadly, these cuts have created a lot of certainty about the future of funding, the type of research that's really important to helping me sustain the work that I like to do. But if anything, I mean, this is a reminder that this work is more important now than ever. Encouraging students to think critically about power, who defines problems, who controls resources, and whose knowledge counts. So that's one thing that I think is an important thing to take away from this talk. A couple of others before I conclude. Just to remind you of what motivated all this, these critiques of human-centered design, the impacts of these typically technological interventions, who benefits from them. and again, a need to really expand our conversations over what is good design. And I hope that I've achieved this. But the most important thing that I'm reflecting on is that by incorporating accompaniment in how that we do our work, it seems to make for a more human process, one that's very slow and relational and open-ended. And I do think now more than ever, there's a urgency of bringing that way of thinking into how we design and teach about technology. And just to say this again, I deeply believe that it leads to a more authentic human-centered design process. So I'll leave you with that, and that concludes my talk. I have the names of the people who've helped me do this research. I definitely want to thank the Mozilla Foundation for paying for me to come here and talk about this, and thank you for your time. And I'd be happy to take questions. Thank you so much.