Colin Stanley

A bush encroachment decision support system's metamorphosis

Since the inception of our bush-encroachment decision support system, we have gone through many cycles of adaptations while striving towards what we believed to be a usable system. A fundamental difference between community based users and individualistic users necessitates a change in the design and evaluation methods as well as a community agreement of concepts and values guiding the design. In this paper we share the lessons learned along the story depicting the metamorphosis of a bush encroachment decision support system in Southern African rangelands. Above and beyond community members participating in the design and evaluation of the system, they establish the community grounded values determining the systems quality concepts such as usability.

Community-based co-design in Okomakuara a contribution to 'design in the wild'

Although the wider motivation and principles of Participatory Design (PD) are universal its concepts and techniques are highly contextual. Community-based co-design is a variation of PD, where processes are negotiated within the interaction. Thus this workshop gives participants the opportunity to validate their own conceptualisations, techniques in-situ application against a selected Herero communitys evaluation. Besides a day of new impressions and thoughts we intend to record the discussions and present a shortened video at the conference.

A classification of cultural engagements in community technology design: introducing a transcultural approach

Community technology design has been deeply affected by paradigm shifts and dominant discourses of its seminal disciplines, such as Human Computer Interaction, Cultural and Design theories, and Community Development as reflected in Community Narratives. A particular distinction of community technology design endeavours has been their cultural stance, which directs the agendas, interactions, and outcomes of the collaboration. Applying different cultural lenses to community technology design, shifts not only practices but also directs the levels of awareness, thereby unfolding fundamentally distinct cultural engagement approaches. Previous community technology design research indulged in cross-, inter-, and multicultural approaches to community engagement; it was occupied with meticulously deconstructing and reconstructing perspectives, interactions, roles, and agendas. We argue that when deeply immersed in joint design activities in long-term collaborations, we look beyond individual cultures and enter a transcultural mode of engagement. A transcultural community technology design endeavour supports a continuous creation and re-creation of new meanings, originating from individual entities yet being diffused and continuously reflected within the existing design space. We suggest that within community technology design, a context with abundant cultural diversity, a heightened awareness becomes a necessity. We exemplify different instantiations of the cultural engagement approaches within our long-term collaborations and technology design projects with indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo and Namibia. A transcultural approach to indigenous knowledge preservation and digitisation efforts with indigenous communities opens up a controversial debate about protecting versus integrating local epistemologies.

Indigenous Knowledge for Wikipedia: A Case Study with an OvaHerero Community in Eastern Namibia

Wikipedia has established itself as the top content site on the World Wide Web and the largest and most successful general reference work. Its vision to provide access to the sum of all Human knowledge, however, is far from being realised. Through its Western focus, its strong alignment with existing encyclopaedias and its Internet-savvy editor base it has not even begun to penetrate knowledge that is not codified purely in writing. This paper presents preliminary results from an empirical experiment of oral information collection in rural Namibia converted into citations on Wikipedia. The intention was to collect information from an indigenous group which is currently not derivable from written material and thus remains unreported to Wikipedia under its present rules. We argue that a citation to an oral narrative lacks nothing that one to a written work would offer, that quality criteria like reliability and verifiability are easily comparable and ascertainable. On a practical level, extracting encyclopaedic like information from an indigenous narrator requires a certain amount of prior insight into the context and subject matter to ask the right questions. Further investigations are required to ensure an empirically sound approach to achieve that. We demonstrate that oral citations are possible and viable additions to Wikipedia as a global knowledge repository.

A UX and Usability expression of Pastoral OvaHimba: Personas in the Making and Doing

In working with novel communities there is an imperative need to finding what triggers initial interests and sustains engagement in the co-design of useful, respectful and enriching technological experiences for the very end-user. Co-planning with ovaHimba communities in Namibia tools such as the persona artefact strives to aiding the co-design of a Crowdsourcing system to collect, store, classify and curate Indigenous Knowledge (IK). Preliminary results and insights, pervasiveness in use, and overall designerly backing of persona artefacts for usability and User Experience (UX) invite an initial journey on, and study of the User-Created Persona (UCP) protocol to elicit design elements relevant to ovaHimba. Findings reveal vital features of humanness, collectivism, and attire likings in the way both, existing technologies impact community members and on how upcoming ones are felt, required and preferred for the future to come. This paper informs latent and explicitly situated aspects of usability and UX prompted by prototypes and conversations. Such findings aim to deciphering UCP to communicate and support ethicalities, and technological interests, requirements and goals of pastoral ovaHimba.

Participatory exploration of digitalizing cultural content: getting married. are we ready?

This paper describes a joint investigation of a Herero wedding ceremony as a sample of cultural content to be digitalized. We have through participatory exploration scrutinized embodied media bias and representation with Herero elders in Namibia. One finding is that this method has enabled the elders to be active agents in the digital portrayal of their culture.

Formulating "the obvious" as a task request to the crowd: an interactive design experience across cultural and geographical boundaries

The exhibition will demonstrate the technologies that were co-designed with Namibian rural communities with the main objective of preserving Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Cultural Heritage (CH). Set up as a simulation we showcase how rural communities collect information (images, text, audio, video) about their traditional items or events to be crowdsourced to graphic designers. The graphic designers then model the items in 3D format and send back the rural communities for evaluation and acceptance to be integrated into the existing technologies. Conference participants will be engaged in exploring the technologies as well as discussions around the specific usage and design challenges.

A Digital Indigenous Knowledge Preservation Framework: The 7C Model—Repositioning IK Holders in the Digitization of IK

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) preservation and management has been taken up as a serious endeavor by various governments who have realized the value of IK as well as the opportunities given by emerging technologies. Considering the various phases and activities of indigenous knowledge management which need to be supported through adequate designs and technologies, we propose an integrative framework: the 7C model. The aim is to guide design and implementation efforts as well as to identify and rectify any possible gaps in current implementation plans. The model comprises seven major phases within the indigenous knowledge digitization process, namely, codesign, conceptualization, collection, correction, curation, circulation, and creation of knowledge. We exemplify the application of the model with technologies currently developed under an indigenous knowledge holder’s toolkit promoting the agency of digitalizing indigenous knowledge across the phases.