Penan’s Oroo’ Short Message Signs (PO-SMS): Co-design of a Digital Jungle Sign Language Application

Abstract

Abstract. Oroo', a very peculiar jungle sign language of the semi-nomadic Penan in Malaysia, Borneo Island, is at the virtue of extinction with recent changes in lifestyle. The youth inhabiting the rainforest are more drawn to technology than traditional forest activities needing cognizance of Oroo'. In partnership with community members of Long Lamai, as part of a long term collaboration, we launched into revitalizing Oroo' through digitalization. Complementing previous efforts of database, tangible and game developments, we postulate that a language can only be revitalized if integrated in daily use. Thus in this paper we present the co-design of the Penan's Oroo' Short Message Signs (PO-SMS) application, which extends current technology driven communication means. Following a community-based co-design approach, a group of local youth and elders have led the unique design of their own digital indigenous communication tool. Our research contributes directly to the INTERACT 2015 theme of "Connection.Tradition.Innovation".

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

“…Working with Long Lamai youth in the Malaysian jungle, [49] adapt personas within a PD project by enabling young participants to engage in SMS-composing without losing face. Researchers requested personas to possess a name, a gender and typical characteristics of youth and elders in the surroundings.…”

A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

“…Researchers [31] working with Long Lamai youth in the Malaysian jungle scaffold from the grassroots expertise of the elder and adapt personas to Participatory Design principles by enabling young participants to engaging via SMScomposing without losing face. Youth's thinking, creativity and consciousness come in personas created by eliciting their communicational needs and styles, to then proceed with suitable affordances to co-designing an SMS App based on the Penan's Oroo' signs' language.…”

“…Persona as a Tool was framed in the Global North anchored in its etymology and semiotics, thus it carries values of its context of original use. As such there are two emerging and opposing views in using persona elsewhere: deployed as is [2,10,15,18,19,22,23], and adapting it to derive further situated offerings [3,4,8,16,20,31].…”

A Textual Feedback Tool for Empowering Participants in Usability and UX Evaluations

“…The tools employed in usability evaluation would only be effective if the imported UX evaluation methods were localised for the Malaysian context (Yeo, 2002). Yeo and others, e.g., Zaman & Winschiers-Theophilus (2015), have continued this line of research, but with a focus on rural users in Malaysia, and, because classic CTA UX evaluation did not work with these user groups, have developed a community participatory design approach. However, Yeo's original line of work that focused on localising UX evaluation methods to the classic UX user group: the urban, big city user, continues to be important, as these users make up the major part of the population of IT users in Malaysia.…”