Designing interactions with technologies that are compatible with rural wisdom and skills can help to digitally enfranchise rural people and, thus, contribute to community cohesion in the face of Africa's urbanization. Oral information has been integral to rural identity and livelihood in Africa for generations. However, the use of technology can inadvertently displace the knowledge of communities with practices that differ from the knowledge traditions in which technology is designed. We propose that devices that are sensitive to users' locations, combined with platforms for social networking and user-generated content, offer intriguing opportunities for rural communities to extend their knowledge practices digitally. In this paper we present insights on the way rural people of the Herero tribe manage information spatially and temporally during some of our design activities in Namibia. We generated these insights from ethnography and detailed analysis of interactions with media in our ongoing Ethnographic Action Research. Rural participants had not depicted their wisdom graphically by photography or video before, rarely use writing materials and some cannot read. Thus, we gathered 30 h of observer-and participant-recorded video and participants' interpretations and interactions with thumbnail photos from video, photography and paper. We describe insights into verbal and bodily interactions and relationships between bodies, movements, settings, knowledge and identity. These findings have made us more sensitive to local experiences of locations and more aware of assumptions about space and time embedded in locative media. As a result, we have started to adopt an approach that emphasizes connectors rather than points and social-relational and topokinetic rather than topographic spaces. In the final section of the paper we discuss applying this approach in design by responding to the ways that participants use social relationships to orient information and use voice, gesture and movement to incorporate locations into this ''dialogic''. In conclusion we outline why we hope our reflections will inspire others to examine the spatial, temporal and social affordances of technologies within the bonds of rural, and other, communities.

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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.

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.

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.