Superstitious pigeons: An example of designing for cultural relevance

I found an interesting example of designing for cultural relevance in the most mundane place—paying for parking tickets. I've noticed that since parking lot ticket machines were first introduced into South Africa, a strange practice emerged. This practice is reminiscent of Skinner's superstitious pigeons (see this article for a layman's summary).

Essentially said practice unfolds like this:

1. A South African goes to pay for their parking ticket at the machine

2. They insert coins for the amount specified

3. One or more coins are rejected from the machine for no apparent reason

The superstition part comes in here. South African's believe that scratching the coin against the ticket machine somehow will make the machine accept the coin. So the next part of the process goes something like:

4. The South African rubs the rejected coin against the metal of the machine several times, re-inserts the rejected coin and hopes it gets accepted

5. If it is rejected again, the procedure is to repeat Step 4 until there is success.

Should Step 5 fail, the solution is to find other coins, use notes or in some cases, yell expletives and give up exasperated.

Now this process in itself has mostly just amused me but the other day, I noticed that the ticket machine designers take this superstitious practice very seriously. Case in point, to the left, this is a photo I took of a ticket machine at a major shopping center, Canal Walk, a few days ago. Notice the "Scratch Plate" which looks like it has seen good use and wear from users rubbing the coins, frantically trying to get the machine to accept their money offerings.

What I find fascinating is that this scratch pad serves no functional purpose, and may be totally based on superstition. Or perhaps, rubbing those coins does make the machine gods happy and I'm just not in the know.

In all, this example, warmed my HCI heart to see that sometimes, design really is about fitting the system to the local situation and not only about ease of use.

Qualitative research tools

As a somewhat seasoned qualitative researcher, I am always on the lookout for tools to improve the coding process for going through interview transcripts, particularly since I'm a fan of grounded theory. (As an aside, read this book to find out more about grounded theory or read my advisors take on the theory, noting that the strong-point of this approach is how operationalizable the steps are). I've used everything from MS Excel, to the open source tool Weft QDA to track codes for quotes and for open and axial coding.

Weft QDA was several steps up from Excel, allowing you to digitally annotate documents with codes and categorize them into higher level codes. However, using Weft, all documents have to be converted to plain text and the software is a little buggy. But on the other hand, given the unforgiving graduate student budget, this makes for a good option if you want to manage your codes digitally.

Recently, I started using Atlas.ti with a student licence and I am utterly pleased. The tool allows for easy open coding (or creating new codes), and you can also select from codes you've already created. I'm especially a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts for the coding process. What's better is that you can easily group codes into "Families" for axial coding. The tool also gives you counts of how many times a code has occurred and makes it easy to view quotes associated with a particular code, or family of codes, both in the editor or for printing purposes.

So for me, I'll look no further than Atlas.ti for now and I highly recommend investing in it if you can spare the change and you're a fan of having a digital copy of a qualitative analysis (even though its still nice to shift pieces of paper and post-its around!).

Seeing a new side of South Africa and Cape Town

I've decided to resurrect my failed attempt at blogging while on internship in my home town, gorgeous Cape Town in South Africa. This is a quick summary of the country's atmosphere as I am experiencing it since my arrival in mid-August.

So let's start with the bad news down here include the crippling public servants strike, causing education and healthcare to grind to a halt. Final year high school students' matric exams are being affected as as teachers lay down their chalk, and more sadly, patients and young babies are dying as nurses all over the country elect to stay away from work during wage negotiations. Coupled with that there's much hype over a proposed bill, The Protection of Information Bill, geared at censoring the South African media.

But as always, on to the good news. I've had somewhat of a nice barometer on the South African climate, visiting here once a year for the past 5 years. After seeing a particular slump in the country's morale in 2007, I'm glad to report that after the world cup, the country is in a positive upswing. Several months after the event is over, flags are still flying brightly all over the place. Never before, since our transition to a democratic government after our 1994 elections, have I seen such positivity or pride in the nation, or our colorful flag adorning cars and attire and flying high from Franschhoek to Salt River.

And because of this continuous positive energy, encompassed by one of our favorite phrases, "'n boer maak 'n plan" or "we'll make a plan", which generally means in any situation, that we will be alright and we will figure it out, this country continues to amaze me. I am soaking up, with delight, its diversity as I research home internet use, interacting with lovely people of different economic, racial and class backgrounds, each with their own accents and cultural nuances. What a great place to be and how lucky I am to enjoy this rich experience in my life as a researcher :). And on that ending note, I hope this post inspires me to write more on my adventures down here in my latest attempt at blogging.

i heart lolcats

Omg this is so cute!!!
[CUTE CAT PIC NO LONGER EXISTS]
see more crazy cat pics

Sicko: Towards universal health care...

Watched Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko about the US health care system and how its primarily managed by private health care organizations like Kaiser Permanente, Humana and so forth. It was really interesting to see the comparison to countries with national health care systems like France and the UK. Also, it was kind of scary to be reminded that the health care system here is pretty odd - I myself have taken to avoiding regular dental check-ups because its so hard to find an affordable health care plan that covers dental expenses for graduate students - my teeth haven't fallen out yet and this year I caved and shelled out $800+ for a check-up and some fillings. Maybe I should move to Canada...

Anyways, I highly recommend the movie if you like Moore's style :) It's also a timely and interesting documentary to watch given that health care is one of the main issues that comes up in Obama and Clinton debates.

Food security: Drought. Rice. Unrest.

At first bet, food and security don't seem to belong in the same sentence but...climate change is slowly causing disruptions to the global food supply, resulting in national security concerns. The NYTimes has cool article on how a 6 year drought in Australia is causing havoc with rice prices, and subsequent unrest in countries dependent on rice exports for their staples.

Looks like environmental concerns, and subsequent effects on food/water supplies will to continue to creep into international affairs - for example the article mentions how the use of crops like corn for biofuels is contentious because its pushing up food prices, with developing countries being mostly affected by these price increases. This affects policies on renewable energies, etc.

Reminds me of a recent Colbert Report on how potential water shortages may cause future political unrest. So food/water, climate change and security may be keywords in many discussions to come...arguably with developing countries suffering the most from shortages and price hikes.

An addition: South African trade union workers are marching against rising food prices...

NY Times, Cell phones and global poverty...

The NY Times has finally caught on that cell phones are a good platform for communication and connectivity in developing countries...

The title of the article is "Can the cell phone help end global poverty?" which seems like an overstatement... but it's a fairly nice article on an anthropologist from Nokia who does user research in Africa and other developing parts of the world...his mission is to harvest information on people, their cell phone needs and subsequently inform the design of Nokia cell phones...they must be doing a good job because I'm a total Nokia junkie :)