Deliberate Interactions: Characterizing Technology Use in Nairobi, Kenya

We present results from a qualitative study examining how professionals living and working in Nairobi, Kenya regularly use ICT in their everyday lives. There are two contributions of this work for the HCI community. First, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating constraints our participants encountered when using technology in an infrastructure-poor setting. These constraints are limited bandwidth, high costs, differing perceptions of responsiveness, and threats to physical and virtual security. Second, we use our findings to critically evaluate the "access, anytime and anywhere" construct shaping the design of future technologies. We present an alternative vision called deliberate interactions--a planned and purposeful interaction style that involves offline preparation and discuss ways ICT can support this online usage behavior.