Till, Sarina and Verdezoto Dias, Nervo and Densmore, Melissa (2025) Fostering co-design readiness in South Africa, Interacting with Computers, Oxford Academic.
Full text not available from this repository. (Use alternate locations listed below)Abstract
Technological artifacts designed by individuals from developing nations often do not flourish in developing regions. Many authors conducting work in these regions have therefore called on researchers to make use of co-design in order to mitigate power imbalances, include the voices of communities in the design of technology intended for them, and design and build more contextually situated technology. Many of these authors also refer to the need for co-design readiness in their work. However, little is known about how co-design readiness can be articulated and achieved, especially when working with rural communities. In this paper, we make use of qualitative meta-analysis to interrogate the data from three distinct case studies in order to investigate co-design readiness. We found that co-design readiness comprises three forms, namely: (1) emotional readiness built through trust, relationship building, and empathy; (2) cultural readiness, which requires that researchers and participants have an awareness and respect for each other’s cultural values and beliefs; and, finally, (3) readiness in terms of confidence and familiarity with the technologies used which can be achieved through careful and strategic methodological decisions. We found that researchers should explicitly plan for readiness and should not assume that readiness will grow organically and that co-design, if planned well is a lengthy process. Finally, we provide learnings from our work to how co-design readiness can be achieved through planning and methodological decisions.
| Item Type: | Journal article (online only) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | co-design, co-design readiness, community, south africa, hyrdoponic, early childhood education |
| Subjects: | Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) Human-centered computing > Interaction design > Interaction design process and methods > Participatory design Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) > HCI design and evaluation methods > Field studies |
| Alternate Locations: | https://academic.oup.com/iwc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/iwc/iwaf005/8052065 |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Oct 2025 06:23 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Oct 2025 06:23 |
| URI: | https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1765 |
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