User-Created Personas in Otjise as a Collective Effort

In October 2015 two ovaHimba male elders and four youngsters took part of this session held in Otjise, a village in the Kunene region in the North of Namibia.

Lecturer and facilitator Gereon Koch Kapuire (Namibia University of Science and Technology), PT lecturer at Namibia University of Science and Technology and PhD candidate Daniel G. Cabrero (University of West London), lecturer and facilitator Colin Stanley (Namibia University of Science and Technology), and local students Michael Chamunorwa Kwenda and Donovan Maasz (Namibia University of Science and Technology) took part of this trip.

Focusing in finding persona representations, a focus-group took place to discuss and explore how this ovaHimba community understood their social structure and those who compounded it. Subsequently scenarios were proposed as to where each group within the community would utilise the IK Crowdsourcing system proposed in an earlier usability testing, and how it’d work out for each group.

Three different groupings as per male elder, female and male youngsters arose, while, in turn, the local co-designers proposed scenarios that involved all of the community members working collectively towards the desired aim with the system instead of as per the different groupings previously highlighted.

As a scientific literary result, this session is included in both, a scientific paper published at the CHIuXID’16 conference held in Jakarta (Indonesia) in April 2016 and an upcoming publication at an international conference to be held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2016.