Activity Theory and Interactive Design for the African Storybook Initiative

摘要

This research is concerned with the development and evaluation of a redesign of the online and mobile app African Story-book initiative services that support the authoring and reading of openly licensed storybooks to support literacy development in Africa. This redesign was initiated after a review of the African Storybook web site and presented an opportunity to align the sociocultural theory used by African Storybook researchers and design of interactive artifacts and environments. The redesign makes use of a number of cultural-historical activity theory principles, including: object of activity (obyekt an independent entity and predmet the imagined objective outcome), tool mediated and shared objects that are part of the third-generation activity system. Three primary activities were identified (read, author and research). The author activity, implemented as a shared object includes library, create, translate and adapt objects of activity. Each of these objects make use of a single design pattern that includes a list of items that can be sorted, searched and viewed. Results from usability testing sessions lead to a refined design and provided evidence that redesign addresses problems identified during the review. This research illustrated that the reading, authoring and research obyekts created by individuals support the outcome of a new storybook (predmet).