No abstract

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.

Considering the high unemployment rate among Namibian youth and a lack of job opportunities, the promotion of entrepreneurship has gained wider attention in the country. A number of initiatives have been started such as entrepreneurship trainings and workshops, business idea competitions, etc. All these aim to inspire young people to think of alternative income sources. As part of a two-year funded community outreach research and development (R&D) project, we have investigated participatory approaches to engage marginalized youth into conceptualizing their own context, imparting skills, and deriving new career paths. This paper reports and reflects on one of the interventions we have recently concluded with a group of youth in Havana, an informal settlement in the outskirts of Windhoek. We conducted what we entitled "The Havana Entrepreneur", a series of interactions inspired upon the model of the American reality game show "The Apprentice". Over a number of weeks two youth groups were given challenges to tackle by means of competing against one another. After completion of each challenge, groups were rated by a number of judges on skills demonstrated such as marketing, presentation, reflection and creativity among others. We observed an increase in, and improvement of skills revealed along tasks' completion, besides an openly expressed self-realization and discovery of abilities by participants. Moreover, the youth are currently engaged in the continuation of activities beyond the initial entrepreneurial interactions. Thus we suggest replicating "The Havana Entrepreneur", including the recording on camera of it by the youth themselves as a new mode to instigating a wider entrepreneurial spirit in informal settlements.

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.

Eliciting and analyzing requirements within knowledge systems, which fundamentally differ so far from technology supported systems represent particular challenges. African rural communities' life is deeply rooted in an African Indigenous knowledge system manifested in their practices such as Traditional Medicine. We describe our endeavors to elicit requirements to design a system to support the accumulation and sharing of traditional local knowledge within two rural Herero communities in Namibia. We show how our method addressed various challenges in eliciting and depicting intangible principles arising because African communities do not dichotomize theoretical and practical know-how or privilege a science of abstraction and generalization. Ethnography provided insights into etiology, or causal interrelationships between social values, spiritual elements and everyday life. Participatory methods, involving youth and elders, revealed nuances in social relations and pedagogy pertinent to the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation. Researcher and participant-recorded audio-visual media revealed that interactions prioritize speech, gesture and bodily interaction, above visual context. Analysis of the performed and narrated structures reveal some of the ways that people tacitly transfer bodily and felt-experiences and temporal patterns in storytelling. Experiments using digital and paperbased media, in situ rurally showed the ways that people in rural settings encounter and learn within their everyday experiences of the land. These analyses also demonstrate that own ontological and representational biases can constrain eliciting local meanings and analyzing transformations in meaning as we introduce media. Reflections on our method are of value to others who need to elicit requirements in communities whose literacy, social and spiritual logic and values profoundly differ from those in the knowledge systems that typify ICT design.