Colin Stanley

• Laurea specialistica in Computer Science
• Lecturer at Polytechnic of Namibia

We are concerned with misinterpretations and misrepresentations of indigenous knowledge and people in the digital media as created through othering. Therefore, we advocate for a community-based approach to the digitalisation of indigenous knowledge by indigenous people. In this paper, we present the development of an ovaHimba curated digital reposi...

Many technology projects are driven by (hidden) agendas which prioritize the one or the other stakeholder or the technology itself, thereby creating tensions and compromising important perspectives. In the field of digital conservation and wildlife management, the focus has often been on safeguarding wildlife (the lion), not incorporating socio-eco...

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) preservation and management has been taken up as a serious endeavor by various governments who have realized the value of IK as well as the opportunities given by emerging technologies. Considering the various phases and activities of indigenous knowledge management which need to be supported through adequate designs and t...

This chapter presents our latest interventions within the ongoing digitization of cultural heritage of the ovaHerero and ovaHimba indigenous communities in pastoral Namibia. It describes the communicative and technical processes undertaken in a number of sessions at four different sites over a one and a half year period. These sessions were part of...

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) preservation is at the core of our collaborative efforts with indigenous communities in Namibia. Recognising the local IK holder as a key agent in the process, we co-design technologies that enable IK holders in the rural communities to collect their own IK. An imperative component in the equation is community engagement,...

Wikipedia has established itself as the top content site on the World Wide Web and the largest and most successful general reference work. Its vision to provide access to the sum of all Human knowledge, however, is far from being realised. Through its Western focus, its strong alignment with existing encyclopaedias and its Internet-savvy editor bas...

The exhibition will demonstrate the technologies that were co-designed with Namibian rural communities with the main objective of preserving Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Cultural Heritage (CH). Set up as a simulation we showcase how rural communities collect information (images, text, audio, video) about their traditional items or events to be cro...

In working with novel communities there is an imperative need to finding what triggers initial interests and sustains engagement in the co-design of useful, respectful and enriching technological experiences for the very end-user. Co-planning with ovaHimba communities in Namibia tools such as the persona artefact strives to aiding the co-design of...

Situating technology design in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, emphasizes principles of humanness and connectedness in human interactions. Curiosity, interest and learnings have grown among those who have co-designed with us for the past eight years; whereas those who have just began co-designing endeavours take on it in different and also simila...

This paper presents the initial experiences and reflective accounts on the arrival of a European research colleague who recently joined our team of researchers working with Indigenous communities in Namibia. He aims to explore how communities across Namibia take on, understand and create persona artefacts of their own, and whether this may simulate...

It has been widely reported that interactions with and expectations of technology differ across cultural contexts. Concepts such as 'usability' have shown to be context- dependent, thus user interfaces intuitive to one group of users appears counter-intuitive to the others. In an attempt to localise a user interface of a tablet based system aimed a...

Although the wider motivation and principles of Participatory Design (PD) are universal its concepts and techniques are highly contextual. Community-based co-design is a variation of PD, where processes are negotiated within the interaction. Thus this workshop gives participants the opportunity to validate their own conceptualisations, techniques i...

This paper describes a joint investigation of a Herero wedding ceremony as a sample of cultural content to be digitalized. We have through participatory exploration scrutinized embodied media bias and representation with Herero elders in Namibia. One finding is that this method has enabled the elders to be active agents in the digital portrayal of...

In this paper, we describe our newest project endeavor in which we conceptualize crowdsourcing technology development for and with rural communities in Namibia. The project is based on design work which was carried out over a longer period of time with a single rural pilot community in Namibia and its transferability of technology and concepts into...

Since the inception of our bush-encroachment decision support system, we have gone through many cycles of adaptations while striving towards what we believed to be a usable system. A fundamental difference between community based users and individualistic users necessitates a change in the design and evaluation methods as well as a community agreem...