THE CO-DESIGN PROCESS

The ORÍGENES app has been co-designed by members of the Camusu Aike and Kopolke Tehuelche communities in Southern Patagonia and Simon Robinson (computer scientist from Swansea University, Wales, United Kingdom). The two-day co-design workshop was held in Rio Gallegos (Argentina) in November 2018, and was attended by some 40 people. The aim of the workshop was to develop a digital tool that would enable the Tehuelche people to recover and repossess (in digital format) images of their ancestors, mostly taken by Europeans and creoles in the context of colonial relations. Coordinated by Geraldine Lublin (researcher also at Swansea University) and Mariela Eva Rodríguez (anthropologist at the University of Buenos Aires-CONICET, Argentina), the workshop was funded by the CHERISH-DE Digital Economy Research Centre and supported by the Intercultural Bilingual Education team (MEIB) of the Education Council of the Province of Santa Cruz, Argentina and the Río Gallegos Campus of the National University of Southern Patagonia (Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral, UNPA-UARG), which hosted the workshop in its premises.

 

In addition to imagining what the digital tool might be like, the reflections that emerged during the workshop included questions about the circumstances in which the photographs were taken and about the power relations involved. Some of the questions which emerged were: Did the people portrayed pose voluntarily or under coercion? Why are those photos now in archives in different parts of the world? What are those archives like and how can they be accessed? Who are their 'rightful owners'? How come hardly anyone has pictures of their ancestors? Why is there a difference in the availability of photos of some indigenous peoples compared to others?

In order to design ORÍGENES, Simon Robinson used as a starting point the Com-Phone Story Maker app he had developed with and for resource-constrained communities in South Africa, who were interested in sharing stories, learning resources, healthcare advice, advertising and documenting community life. The co-design of ORÍGENES allowed Simon to advance his research on how to improve interactions between people and computers (a field called 'human-computer Interaction', HCI) and, in turn, take a step forward in democratising access to technology.