Bridging Communications Across the Digital Divide

Blake, Edwin H and Tucker, William D (2004) Bridging Communications Across the Digital Divide, Proceedings of Proceedings of Social Intelligence Design 2004, 2004, Enschede, Netherlands.

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Abstract

Connecting people across the Digital Divide is as much a social effort as a technological one. We are developing a community-centered approach to learn how interaction techniques can compensate for poor communication across the Digital Divide. We have incorporated the lessons learnt regarding Social Intelligence Design in an (abstract) device called the SoftBridge. The device allows information to flow from endpoints through adapters (getting converted if necessary), and out to destination endpoints. Field trials are underway with two communities in South Africa, disadvantaged deaf users and an isolated rural community. First lessons learned show that we have to design user interfaces that allow users to understand and cope with delay (latency) as a necessary consequence of our approach.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Community-centered, Digital Divide, Information Society, Multi-Modal, User Interface, User-Centered Design.
Subjects:	Human-centered computing Social and professional topics Applied computing
Date Deposited:	21 Oct 2004
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:35
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/156

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