Dr. Aditya Deshbandhu, Department of Communication and Digital Media Sociology, University of Exeter gave a talk on Capabilities, Platforms, and HCI: Towards a Flexible framework for understanding Prolonged Engagement in the Global South on 6 September.
His research examines video games, new media platforms and practices, and the many understandings of the digital divide. He also tries to understand how people engage with digital artefacts, and how these interactions shape their everyday lives.

In the talk, Dr. Deshbandhu expanded on an upcoming research trajectory at the intersection of HCI, platform cultures, and usability studies where researchers are striving to explain the many repurposing(s) of digital platforms. By building on his existing research conducted during the second covid wave in India where he examined the repurposing of WhatsApp groups, his talk focused on how people in Global South contexts like India attempt to make digital artefacts and technological platforms their own by tapping into the affordances offered by these products/services. He elaborated how the findings of the studies demonstrate the reimagining of technological spaces by their users and the uniquely personalized possibilities that they can offer. The session ended with the realization that the development of new capabilities – unique and contextual, forged through repeated engagements and inherently centered on the contextual – as an aspect, has often been overlooked as conventional HCI design, while literature prioritizes wide scale adoption over localization and customization, as the case should be if one aims to reduce the gap between digital access and digital literacy.

September 2023