Shorty Kandjengo

Wearable technologies for children are becoming increasingly widespread, yet many are designed around Western assumptions of materiality, aesthetics, and representation. This raises important questions about how such systems are interpreted in contexts where clothing, materials, and visual symbols carry strong cultural meaning. In settings such as South Africa and Namibia, garments are closely tied to identity, tradition, and social values, making standard Western-oriented designs potentially misaligned with local practices. This Work-in-Progress paper presents early findings from the MoveWithMe project, a wearable movement-based system co-designed with mothers in South Africa and later introduced into a rural Namibian setting. The system consists of a sensor-embedded cape and a companion mobile application featuring animated child and animal characters designed to support engagement through storytelling. To explore how the system may be reinterpreted across cultural contexts, it was introduced in Namibia as a design probe within a community workshop. Participants explored and wore the cape and interacted with the mobile application, sharing open-ended feedback on both the physical and digital components. Findings show that participants moved beyond functionality and focused on cultural expression. They suggested alternative materials such as animal skins, traditional beadwork, and redesigned characters reflecting local clothing and familiar animals. These responses highlight how both the garment and digital media are understood as culturally situated artefacts. This paper provides early insights into how interactive media systems can be reshaped through culturally grounded, community-led processes, contributing to understanding the social and cultural implications of media technologies in diverse contexts.

Participatory Design (PD) aims for inclusivity, but the level of inclusion varies widely. Inclusion often means integrating stakeholder perspectives into design processes, often neglecting bi-directionality, where communities also have agendas. True collaboration rests on mutual understanding, acknowledging the dynamic nature of community collaboration and the holistic impact of shaping relationships. This workshop will explore collaboration challenges and practices with marginalized communities. It will draw on the organisers’ extensive experiences with diverse groups, including nomadic and resettled indigenous communities in Namibia, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Syrian war refugees in Jordan. The workshop encourages sharing and reflecting on experiences with marginalized communities, welcoming contributions from participants to enrich discussions and enhance collective understanding of collaborative practices.

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.

Indigenous people across the globe have all too often been marginalised and not been considered in decisions that directly concern their life. We maintain the significance of incorporating indigenous perspectives in society to create a global dialogue through direct participation. In this light we propose a situated action in which our co-author from the Ju/’hoansi tribe, one of the San ethnicity in Southern Africa, digitally records semi-structured conversations with members of other indigenous communities at the conference and public spaces in Sibu. Then participants are engaged into a participatory exploration of processing the audio files into sound installations and soundscapes which “amplify indigenous voices“. We anticipate that the products can be reused for further initiatives in the different countries, raising awareness and calling for action on matters of concern for indigenous people.

We present a Virtual Reality (VR) implementation of a traditional Ju/’Hoansi dance called /Hi//ka//kusi. It is a dance of celebration of rain, food, and prosperity, complemented by a song of laughter, which is mostly performed by the women in the community. They are dancing in a circle while throwing a !nara melon (or other objects) to the woman dancing just behind them. Upon request by the Donkerbos community members to create a virtual reality application of the dance, we video-recorded a group of women demonstrating the dance. The videos were used to map people’s figures, poses, and movements into 3d graphics and animations. The application runs in a low-poly environment on an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset and uses the in-built, inside-out tracking cameras for the throwing and catching interaction. The VR user becomes part of an immersive experience, catching and throwing while dancing among the non-player character (NPC) Ju/’Hoansi women. The Donkerbos community has, since the development of the prototype, confirmed the VR experience. They agreed that it represents their culture well and only requested for minor changes. Generally, we maintain that the creation of such cultural experiences is promising in regard to safeguarding cultural heritage practices.