David Frohlich is the Director of the Digital World Research Centre and Professor of Interaction Design at the University of Surrey, where he works on future photography, literacy and communication technologies. Before joining Digital World, Frohlich, who has a PhD in psychology, spent 14 years as Senior Research Scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs, a time devoted to tangible interfaces, new media design, and the digital divide. Matt Jones returned from New Zealand to Wales to help set up the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University. As a Reader in the FIT Lab he explores the human-computer interaction aspects of mobile and ubiquitous computing as well as socially-inclusive and impacting design. He recently co-authored Mobile Interaction Design (Wiley 2006). For the last two years, Frohlich and Jones have worked together on StoryBank, a project enabling textual and computer illiterate people to build a repository of audio-visual content via camera phones. Here's their report from Budikote, a village in rural India.

http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/storybank/index.php

Artwork by Zhu Yue Yao

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

Have you just updated your Facebook status? Watched a video on YouTube? Uploaded your latest holiday photos to Flickr, perhaps? If not, you're quite unusual. Hundreds of millions of us have caught the user-generated content habit over the last couple of years and many now regularly slide or flip open their mobile to participate in this revolution.

Of course, people have always wanted to express themselves by capturing and sharing the moment – before Last.fm playlists, teenagers would swap home-mixes of their favourite records, and we've all inflicted photo album flicking sessions on friends and loved ones. Recently though, there's been a proliferation of cheap, convenient ways to capture and store content, especially via mobile phones. Then, along came innovative services, dubbed Web 2.0, that so elegantly weave technological and social networks together. So, within a few years, we've moved from a world of 'personal' content to one where a user called guitar90 can make a simple video of his musical skill, upload it to YouTube, and attract 37 million (and counting) of us to view it.

The guitar90 phenomenon

And yet, what we are beginning to take for granted would strike billions of people as extraordinary. The majority of the world's population – in places like rural India and China, many countries in Africa, remote islands in the Pacific – live on a different technological planet, without access to computers or networks; they are on the wrong side of what's been called the 'global digital divide'. In all the talk about computing becoming just like a utility as common and pervasive as electricity it is good to be reminded of facts like these: Africa accounts for just 3.5% of the total users of the web; North America, with a third of the population, 18%; Ethiopia, with a population around that of the UK, has just 10,000 users.

Things are changing though, with many countries seeing dramatic improvements in access to communications and IT. Mobile phones are having a particular impact, and the StoryBank project, based in a rural Indian region, has been looking at ways of using them to enable technology-poor villagers to participate in and benefit from content creation and sharing activities. Skipping the text-based internet paradigm altogether, the project is exploring how camera phones and a library of digital stories (the story-bank) can be used to extend existing initiatives in community radio.

The project is funded by the one of the UK's research funding agencies, the Engineering Physical Science Research Council, and is a collaboration between several universities and local organisations. It is based in Budikote, a bumpy two hour drive from Bangalore. Unlike hectic, bustling Bangalore, with its burgeoning IT industry, Budikote is a small community of some 3,000 people, supported by agriculture. Goats and cows wander the dusty main road; monkeys chatter in the trees; people gather under the shade of trees to eat food bought from the roadside stalls and chat. Most people in the village have low levels of literacy and their exposure to computers is very limited. However, at the start of 2007 one of the mobile phone operators in India installed a base-station, and within 9 months around 90% of the households had access to a mobile phone.

While village textual literacy rates are low, visual and oral expression thrive. From daybreak to dusk, colour and imagery are all around – each morning, women chalk up intricate rangoli patterns outside the entrances of their homes, to greet the day. There's a long tradition of storytelling in the region, too, and during one of the fieldtrips we witnessed an interesting method of communal storytelling that demonstrated a striking mixture of audio and visual expression: the storyteller slowly unfurled a scroll to reveal images to complement his patter. Throughout the tale, a band played accompanying music in the background. This kind of creativity is also used in the production of a daily community radio broadcast called Namma Dhwani or 'our voices': a village committee decides what kind of programmes to make and volunteers from the village, mainly women, undertake to research and record news items on health, education, farming and other topics that are broadcast alongside devotional music and public service announcements.

The starting point for the StoryBank project then, was a sense that the villagers had valuable stories and information to share, which might be extended with new technology. In particular, the way they currently told stories with pictures and music might be used to enliven radio content, or could be captured and shared in new ways. This observation led us to examine the way community radio programmes are made and enjoyed, and identify some real benefits that might be achieved with digital technology. These included widening participation through making stories on a mobile phone, using photographs as illustrations, and providing 'listen again' facilities in a convenient location.

So the system we've built has at its heart a large touch screen display in the village's community resource centre. This is a place where self-help groups gather, school children hang out and other villagers often pass through for information or to bump into their friends. Then, there are the mobile phones, Nokia N80s, donated by Nokia, a partner in the project. Villagers make short stories of up to six images and a two-minute audio track on the phones. They can then go to the community centre and donate their content to the StoryBank. Alternatively, they might want to share their story with others – the phone has a special-purpose media player and stories can be transferred to other phones over Bluetooth. All of the stories are available for browsing on the StoryBank screen – groups can watch them together and they can be downloaded to the phones for later viewing.

Click the picture to watch the movie

Remember, though, the special context of the village – very few people can read and write and computer skills are low. The design of the system takes these aspects into account. No text is used in any of the user interfaces and traditional menus with their options, sub-options, and sub-sub-options have been replaced by more direct forms of interaction.

Take the StoryBank display, as an example. We've used a dynamic visual collage to display the stories – media squares, each containing a villager's story, continuously emerge, float and shrink within the display. Tapping on any of the squares brings up the story in full screen mode. Quicker access to particular types of content is possible too – pressing icons filters the collage so that only stories of the selected types, say health or education, bubble to the surface.

Touch screen display with stories being collaged dynamically

After refining the design and operation of the system with the locals, we worked with two non-governmental organisations in the village to put it to the test. MYRADA, who run the resource centre, recruited three community representatives to give out the phones, while VOICES, who set up the community radio station, trained up the representatives in using the phones and display, and acted as our eyes and ears to see how they would be used. Ten phones were deployed for about 5 weeks at the end of last year and could be used to record audio-photo stories about anything the villagers thought other people might like to know about. These stories were regularly transferred to the touch screen display, where a collection of digitized radio broadcasts were also stored. As the number of stories grew, regular visitors to the resource centre were invited to view them on the shared display, and individual visitors increased as news of particular stories spread by word of mouth.

During the trial period, hundreds of villagers took part both in creating stories and viewing them on the StoryBank. The system gave a public voice to many more people in the village than ever before. People of all ages, castes and occupations were involved – school children and young people were particularly enthusiastic, but other groups also participated – including farmers, labourers, health workers, auto drivers, teachers, cleaners, shopkeepers, carpenters and housewives. This wide participation of people in the trial reflected the usability of our phone and display interfaces, and shows that it is possible to create and share digital content without any textual input and output, or prior knowledge of multimedia editing tools and computers.

To understand what villagers were using the StoryBank system for, we looked at the process and content of story creation, and asked them which stories they found useful and why. Although we wanted the phones to be loaned to individual authors for short periods of time, we discovered a great reticence by community representatives to give them out overnight. So story creation was usually done in their presence, and was initially stimulated by a community meeting where over 250 story ideas were deliberately brainstormed across a range of topic categories. While this was not how we intended the phones to be used, this behaviour dramatically demonstrates the community nature of technology use in this context, and immediately highlights the need for better ways of tracking and sharing mobile phones originally designed for personal use. It also shows that the creation of StoryBank stories was approached by the community in the same way as the creation of community radio programmes – planned by a committee for practical community benefit. However, not everything about this process went to plan.

Only about a fifth of planned stories were actually made. These comprised about a third (46) of the total number of recorded stories (137), with two-thirds added more spontaneously by villager authors themselves (91). This resulted in the spread of story topics. Often the planned stories were of serious development content such as how to grow rice, local crops, sheep rearing or the medicinal uses of plants, while the unplanned stories were more frivolous in nature such as beauty tips, mythical stories, songs or, in one case, pictures and descriptions of a student's best paintings. Sometimes the unplanned content was simply a very current news item, such as a report of the village celebration of 'state day'. This was very popular for a few days afterwards. There was also a mis-match between the most popular stories made and those people most preferred to watch – stories on education, student issues, entertainment and farming were the most commonly created, while those on entertainment, student issues and health were the ones people liked the most. Many people spoke about the attraction of more personal stories on the touch screen display, despite the lack of a 'personal' topic icon or category for classifying them. For example, a story showing a series of children talking about themselves was very popular with their peer group.

Story types created during the trial

These story examples show just how different and how similar the use of media sharing technologies can be across the global digital divide. In Budikote village, the provision of an ICT system like StoryBank for sharing information about a health issue or crop problem is perceived as a serious working tool for health professionals, farmers and other workers, and of genuine potential value for village development. At the same time, the system also allows new forms of personal expression for the wider community, through combinations of pictures and sounds. Like any other children and teenagers in the developing world, those of Budikote are delighted to have their 'fifteen minutes of fame' (in two minute chunks) by sharing recorded thoughts, achievements and experiences with their friends. The local phone and repository architecture of the StoryBank system doesn't yet match the coverage of an internet-based YouTube or Facebook system, but its use begins to show a similar revolution in personal information sharing not so far removed from the examples we started with. The difference is that it is used here as a community resource for work-related as well as personal information, and mediated by a device which is accessible free of charge to almost everybody in a spoken language community: the text-free Bluetooth camera phone.

This article was written for receiver

Acknowledgements: the StoryBank Project is funded by the EPSRC. In addition to the authors the team includes Dorothy Rachovides, Eran Edirisinghe, Will Harwood, Mounia Lalmas, Dhamikke Wickramanayake, Paul Palmer, Arthur Williams, Roger Tucker, Ram Bhat and Maxine Frank.

Contact: David Frohlich and Matt Jones

------------------------------------------------------------