StoryBank – using mobiles to share stories in an Indian village

For the last two years, David Frohlich and Matt Jones have worked together on StoryBank (movie), a project enabling textual and computer illiterate people to build a repository of audio-visual content via camera phones.

Vodafone Receiver magazine has published their report from Budikote, a village in rural India, as part of its ongoing series on emerging markets.

“The StoryBank project, based in a rural Indian region, has been looking at ways of using [mobile phones] 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.”

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).

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