| Personal
Experiences
Lizette de Wet (University of
the Free State) says:
On
a personal note, when thinking back to CHI 2002, I will
always remember a fairytale picture of snow … a thick
carpet of snow on the lawns, on rooftops, and snow-white
‘blossoms’ on the tree trunks. Another dear thought will
be the American hospitality – a traditional Thanksgiving
dinner (in April!) by Susan Dray and her husband David, to
make us all feel welcome. And welcome we did feel! With snow
falling outside, a fire in the fire-place, two stuffed
turkeys, cranberry sauce, apple pie (among others), and
company from all over the world … how could one not feel
at home?
From the HCI point of view it was a
tremendous experience to meet people (the legends in the
industry) whom I have read about and whose work I have been
admiring for years. It is a rare honour to have so much
knowledge accumulated at one conference in an area in which
one has a great interest in. I especially enjoyed the panel
discussion that Jenny Preece formed part of on teaching
methods in HCI. It was extremely insightful and also good to
realise that we do some things right in our country.
Overall a great honour to have been
able to be part of DevCon and CHI 2002!
Marion Walton (Multimedia
Education Group, University of Cape Town) says:
I
am grateful for having been given the opportunity to attend
CHI2002 and participate in the Development Consortium, with
its focus on HCI in South Africa. This was an incredible
opportunity, which I know will have a major impact on my
research and development work in future. The formal
Development consortium sessions, and many informal
discussions were an opportunity to engage with other people
doing HCI work in the South African context. Interestingly,
these sustained discussions in a foreign place brought me
closer to home, in that they helped me see many
opportunities for local collaboration that I had been unable
to see previously.
On
the whole, my rather narrow concept of how HCI could be
useful in a developing context was well and truly stretched.
Until now, my ideas have always been PC-based, and my
perspective was broadened considerably by the inspiring
examples of people working with wireless technologies, and
(in the conference more broadly) of various kinds of
virtual/augmented realities.
Nonetheless,
while these models are technically impressive, in very few
cases are they designed for the realities of a developing
country. In fact, the keynote speaker of the conference, science
fiction writer and futurologist David Bryn, seemed blithely
ignorant of the realities of the world economy. He argued
that a libertarian approach to surveillance technologies
would democratize their use, and thus help usher in his
‘optimistic’ version of the future, where all (a
category which the audience was quick to point out did not
extend beyond the U.S., let alone to the third world) would
all live in “a world where everyone gets it”. Given this
blindness to our issues, a great deal of work remains to be
done, as we concluded in our two-day development consortium
workshop.
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