Designers, like artists, fuse learned skills with intuition formed over their past experiences to unfold their creativity. Continuous interactions between the designers, their creations, and their informing and receiving environment lead to alignment and harmonisation. However, we observe that displaced designers in an unfamiliar context can no longer blindly rely on their insights only to create acceptable artefacts. In this paper we depict the journey of a young western designer, who accepted the challenge to co-design a 3D graphics visualisation of a small village in Southern Africa. We have observed that the 3D graphics visualisation has significantly increased participation and facilitated cocreation of meaning at the interface of different cultures rather than just being an end product. Not only do we he have to learn to 'see' what the village elders see but also experience a paradigm shift in design and evaluation methods. Based on personal interrelations and immanent differing principles the interactions among the participants are renegotiated continuously during the design process. participatory design, indigenous knowledge, 3D, visualization. H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. EXPLORING NEW TERRITORIES "Designing usable information technology (IT) across cultures is an art, for it being highly creative and sensitive, situational unique, and contextually selfdefined, ideally leading to a synergism of the created artefact with its environment."(Winschiers-Theophilus, 2009a). Being designers and developers we share the desire and ability to create. The artefacts we craft feature our own experience, technical and artistic skills, intended purpose, perception and representation of the design context, the environment and participants' input. Creativity, although often attributed to an individual, has been shown to be a socio-cultural activity resulting within relationships (Amabile, 1998 as cited in (Bratteteig &Wagner, 2010) ). Continuous interactions between the designers, their creations, and their informing and receiving environment lead to alignment and harmonisation over time. In other words, the feedback designers receive within their design space be it from humans or the environment -influences the artefact. Design having been institutionalised in the western world draws on a huge pool of experience and established principles. Co-designing in an environment, which designers and stakeholders are equally familiar with, permits to rely on tacit conventions of choices and methods because of a common habitus (Adams, 2006) and indexicality. However, pointed out in the literature (Puri et. al. 2004 , Walker et. al. 2008 ) and as will be evident through our story here, this common conceptual platform does not persist when the designers move outside of that sphere.  Prologue Our meta-metaphorical protagonist starts out our story in a typical Western country. He has just been approached in his entity of being a designer and 3D artist that he might join a project in Southern Africa to work on a system for conserving indigenous knowledge (IK This paper is a reflective discussion of observations and experiences from a longitudinal co-design process with a local community in rural Namibia. The overall project aim is to develop an IK management system, where the rural elders can re-present their knowledge digitally in a way that they consider to be meaningful as a tool to transfer local practices and stories to the urban youth. We currently pursue a 3D representation of the village in which video recorded IK can be re-contextualised virtually. The paper presents an amalgamation of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
When the aim is to create culturally representative and locally useful artefacts, design relies on embracing a local viewpoint and allowing activities and design solutions to emerge from it REF .
Enhancing cross-cultural participation through creative visual exploration
PDC '12
Sociology Computer Science