Chris Muashekele

This paper, contributing to decolonial design and futuring practice, promotes and explores the recovery of lost futures of the past. Through a series of sessions in a rural indigenous community in Southern Africa, we employ the Chameleon Innovation game as a participatory and community-based ideation method to co-design alternative future innovations and possibilities. The game, as an avenue through which participants accentuate lost indigenous cultural practices from the past, extends an Afrocentric indigenous orientation and past trajectory, enabling participants to actively engage these practices and situate alternative futures. This widens the spectrum within which futures and technologies are co-designed, enabling community participants to actively conceptualise alternative, yet situated, innovations in rural indigenous contexts.

This article presents and describes the inaugural Community Track at the Participatory Design Conference 2024 in Sibu, Sarawak. The track aims to bring together Malaysian and international indigenous community members interested in co-design, participation, inclusion and collaboration in the field of Participatory Design (PD). As the first of its kind, the track seeks to serve as an opportunity for indigenous community members to share knowledge, practices and perspectives with one another and the broader PD community in a high-level academic setting. This underlies the track’s primary ambition, enabling its extension and endorsement as a mainstream event at the conference and other academic activities of similar pedigree.

This paper argues for a fusion between community-based co-design and futuring as an approach for alternative and innovative technology development in rural indigenous settings in Africa. We base our argument on theoretical propositions and two prior empirical project cases in Namibia that applied Community-based co-design and futuring. The cases focus on the co-design of a digital wildlife data collection tool and futuring of rural green energy use, highlighting the fundamental attributes and application of each approach in rural indigenous settings. In a critical stance, we accentuate the shortcomings of each approach and propose an alignment that transcends each approach from individual application to a collective alliance that enables rural indigenous technology innovation.