Facilitating Design for the Unknown: An Inclusive Innovation Design Journey With a San Community in the Kalahari Desert

Abstract

This paper presents a 2-year collaboration that explored how we as design researchers may support an isolated and marginalised indigenous San community to innovate technology products for affluent consumer markets on the other side of the world. The goal was to design a product that brings income to the community, builds skills while facilitating a creative design of self-expression. Community-based co-design was integrated into an inclusive innovation approach. The resulting product was a series of fridge magnet souvenirs using augmented reality technology. As the community was designing not only for a technology but also for an audience unknown to them, we conceptualised the unknown within the process. Our role extended to facilitating negotiations between commercial goals and communities' creative self-expression. We present the appropriated community-based co-design process and reflect on how our facilitation of the unknown affected the process, the creativity and the self-expression by the San participants.

A community-initiated website development project: promoting a San community campsite initiative

“…It requires a change in mindset of the participatory designer. The design is no longer made with the community and for the community, but rather with the community to represent the community for outsiders [52]. In this case, an outside designer can become a representative of the actual users of the service.…”

“…The Donkerbos community has appointed a community representative who is fluent in English to act as the primary contact person for all initiatives. Past and running projects vary from purely research-based projects to commercial ventures and socio-economic and educational development support initiatives [52,46].…”

“…We follow a community-based co-design approach which has been deployed in prior activities with the community [52].…”

“…The community knew, that the image of San typically presented in media was about their traditional hunter-gathering life [46,52]. The community discussed that the traditional imagery could possibly attract tourists, but it would not match the reality in the village, as they wear western clothes rather than their traditional leather loin clothes and do no longer hunt.…”