What if…Silence as a Metaphor for Contemplation and Communication in HCI

As we live and work in a noise-obsessed world, we often do not appreciate the values attributed to the removal of audible expressions. When we attend conferences, we talk and listen to others about our work, thus creating and sharing knowledge. As it stands, the AfriHCI conferences do not have a dedicated space for introspection and reflection even with the efforts towards un-conferencing as a participant-driven meeting with no pre-set agenda and actions. What if conferences were spaces for silence and contemplation rather than the communication of knowledge and practices? In those experimental spaces, what would participation be like? With the conference as a site of power, how can we work with silence as a mode of contemplation and not merely communication in those organisational spaces? In this interactive workshop and walk-shop in the Grand Egyptian Museum, for example), we adopt silence as a metaphor for engaging participants in the embodied experiences of reflection upon the normative practices of knowledge production and dissemination in the community. The takeaway from this embodied experience is the demonstration of silence as a pedagogy of freedom, which ought to be central to HCI's fourth-wave engagement with diverse perspectives of living and being.