Gereon Koch Kapuire

Being participated: a community approach

In this paper, we explore the concept of participatory design from a different viewpoint by drawing on an African philosophy of humanness -Ubuntu-, and African rural community practices. The situational dynamics of participatory interaction become obvious throughout the design experiences within our community project. Supported by a theoretical framework we reflect upon current participatory design practices. We intend to inspire and refine participatory design concepts and methods beyond the particular context of our own experiences.

Putting it in perspective: designing a 3D visualization to contextualize indigenous knowledge in rural Namibia

One design endeavor we pursue in a long-term research and co-design project is the creation of a 3D visualization interface for an indigenous knowledge (IK) management system with rural dwellers of Herero ethnicity in Namibia. Evaluations of earlier prototypes and theories on cultural differences in perception led us to further investigate the suitability of different perspectives of view for the given user group. Through a combination of drawing sessions, design discussions and a high-fidelity technology probe we explored the visual perceptions and preferences of community members; specifically focusing on representation and recognition of objects and places in their everyday environment. We report how the findings from the study have informed design decisions for our particular system while also suggesting that certain viewing angles for 3D visualizations could be more suitable for rural dwellers in general and the collaborating community in specific.

A new visualization approach to re-contextualize indigenous knowledge in rural Africa

Current views of sustainable development recognize the importance of accepting the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) of rural people. However, there is an increasing technological gap between Elder IK holders and the younger generation and a persistent incompatibility between IK and the values, logics and literacies embedded, and supported by ICT. Here, we present an evaluation of new technology that might bridge generations and preserve key elements of local IK in Namibia. We describe how we applied insights, generated by ethnographic, dialogical and participatory action research, in designing a structure in which users can store, organize and retrieve user-generated videos in ways that are compatible with their knowledge system. The structure embeds videos in a scenario-based 3D visualization of a rural village. It accounts for some of the ways this rural community manages information, socially, spatially and temporally and provides users with a recognizable 3D simulated environment in which to re-contextualize de-contextualized video clips. Our formative in situ evaluation of a prototype suggests the visualization is legible to community members, provokes participation in design discussions, offers opportunities for local appropriation and may facilitate knowledge sharing between IK holders and more youthful IK assimilators. Simultaneously differing interpretations of scenarios and modeled objects reveal the limitations of our modeling decisions and raises various questions regarding graphic design details and regional transferability.

Design Democratization with Communities: Drawing Toward Locally Meaningful Design

The authors present community drawing as meaningful representations to inform locally valid technology design. They investigate recognition within and across cultural borders, thereby exposing variances of localities. The study contributes to the still scarce body of empirical work on culturally meaningful development of visual representations and recognition, as part of a longitudinal research project in which we co-design a 3D visualization for a specific Namibian pilot site.

A hermeneutic inquiry into user-created personas in different Namibian locales

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales.

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.

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.