In Search of Alternatives: Co-Designing a Digital Innovation Game With an Indigenous San Community

Technology solutions in rural indigenous African contexts are too often grounded in top-down, needs-based development approaches. Participatory methods, such as Community-based Co-Design, oppose such tendencies and emphasise the participation of communities in the technology design process as culturally-situated experts. We extend and reflect on this premise by exploring the sequential co-design of a digital innovation game with a rural indigenous San community in Namibia as a base for alternative indigenous technology design and futuring. Through emerging insights, we note that despite the community’s complex and intertwined contemporary status quo resulting from a mix of experiences and interactions, it maintains a pronounced desire and connection with its own culture and traditions. As evidenced by the community’s reflections, recollections and constructs during the co-design process, this connection offers new design perspectives that not only counter inapt design concepts but enable alternative technology possibilities grounded in local contexts. Therefore, we argue for its broader consideration within technology endeavours and interventions in indigenous contexts; thereby, enabling a spectrum of local and indigenous innovations.