Mr. Sachith KP, Research Associate at AMMACHI Labs (Amrita Multi Modal Applications Using Computer & Human Interaction), participated and presented a paper, titled “Contextualizing ICT Based Vocational Education for Rural Communities: Addressing Ethnographic Issues and Assessing Design Principles”, at the 16th IFIP TC 13 (International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee) on Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), INTERACT 2017, held at Mumbai, on 25-29 September, 2017.
Mr. Sachith, along with Aiswarya Gopal, Administrative Assistant at AMMACHI Labs, conducted usability studies on games for low literate users using the RTB course under the guidance of Alexander Muir, Associate Professor, AMMACHI Labs, Amritapuri.
INTERACT 2017 was a five day conference which included workshops, field trips and a Doctoral Consortium. Albrecht Schmidt, computer scientist and professor, University of Stuttgart; Matt Jones, professor in Human-Computer Interaction, Swansea University; Rama Bijapurkar, author, consultant and strategist; Gerrit C. Van Der Veer, emeritus professor, past president of ACM SIGCHI; Devdutt Pattanaik, mythologist, author and illustrator, and Tom Gross, professor in Human-Computer Interaction, University of Bamberg, were the invited speakers of the event.
IFIP TC13 aims to develop the science and technology of human–computer interaction by encouraging empirical research, promoting the use of knowledge and methods from the human sciences in design and evaluation of computer systems.
The research was related to building user interfaces for the rural audience focussing on the illiterate and semi-literate community in India for vocational courses. The village women were taught to build over 200 toilets in fourteen states in India. The work was well received due to its ground level impact on the village community. The audience were very keen to know how we tackled the requirement of the low literate target audience in villages across in India where languages, culture, social and living conditions vary drastically.
“While human-computer interaction (HCI) methodologies are designed to be general, they have most often been applied in the context of literate end users in the West. These methodologies were analyzed, contextualized and re-designed for application in HCI for the rural community. In this work, we studied factors that are significantly different in the rural community context — the literacy of the end user and other demographics—by drawing on the literature of oral users, and we came up with a user interface that we argue is more appropriate for our target community,” said Mr. Sachith K. P.
