From Marion Walton

Gary and I had a very very long joint 'to-do' list. There were many many things we planned to change about the world! Whereas I was more inclined to demand change and get angry when the world didn't immediately comply with my demands. Gary taught me to chip away patiently at obstacles while proceeding to build whatever you wanted as a replacement. Moreover he always seemed able to persuade people that it was their idea to change in the first place!  

In particular, we had so many dreams about establishing inter-disciplinary ICT research at UCT. It was actually all just starting to materialise, thanks to his patience with me and his amazing efforts in getting the ICT4D lab off the ground. It always amused me that the Humanities tended to treat graduate students with anything ranging from absolute disdain to benign neglect.  By contrast, Gary was a technologist who actually knew what made humans tick - inspiring surroundings, the space and time to talk, challenge one another and share ideas, good chairs, oodles of bandwidth, a kitchen regularly stocked with food, and a boundless supply of coffee. A key part of our strategy for working together was to offer one or two of my graduate students a space in his lab. We loved all the unsuspected benefits of putting humanities and CS students in the same physical space. He also ensured that we could challenge our own somewhat parochial insights through dialogue with students and scholars from around the African continent. 

As I got older and wiser I came to understand exactly how risky interdisciplinary experiments can be for an academic career. But Gary was always there for me and for our jointly supervised students to cushion the inevitable pitfalls of going off the beaten track.  Ironically, despite all the border-crossing we had to do just to work together, my growing sense of working with a trusted partner from another discipline made me more of a Humanist than ever and Gary was excited about  some pretty fundamental technological barriers he wanted to break down.

Our 2014 was going to be very busy indeed. Our two first cosupervised PhDs have just had their proposals accepted and passed their ethics reviews, and we were plotting furiously to ensure that each of them would work with an MSc student who could implement design ideas arising from their research. We had just drafted a paper about interrogating design and ethnographic approaches to Cloudlet computing, and two of our joint projects with students from Ikamva Youth in Khayelitsha had been accepted as selected projects for Cape Town World Design Capital 2014.

I can't really think clearly about a way forward yet because it means accepting that Gary is actually gone, and my heart is still in open rebellion against that. But I know I would love to share what I've learned from working with Gary,  and I will never give up on making our shared dreams a reality. 

With a heavy heavy heart

Marion