Complementing backyard-bedroom recording studios with a mobile app

Research on township hip-hop musicians in South Africa suggests that media producers in developing countries may increasingly be combining use of mobile phones with other digital technology. This demonstrates the need for M4D designers to conceptualise apps which fit such cross-device digital media ecologies. We describe the co-design methods used to support such hybrid township hip-hop digital media ecologies. These designs emerged from an interdisciplinary collaboration, where the ethnographic work of a media studies student and her access to participants were used as a basis for a computer science student in setting up a participatory design project. Such collaboration has been fostered for some time at the ICT4D lab at our university and may provide a model for postgraduate mobile app design collaboration. The mobile application developed supports hip-hop production. We argue for the importance of such creative digital tools in M4D, as they may facilitate voice and capability in marginalised communitie