Community Consensus: Design Beyond Participation

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus is director and professor in the Schol of Information Technology at the Polytechnic of Namibia. She has lived and lectured in Namibia since 1994. Her research focuses on cross-cultural issues in HCI, cultural appropriation of design and evaluation concepts and methods, representation and retrieval of indigenous knowledge and community-centered design of information systems.

Nicola J. Bidwell is a Principal Researcher at CSIR-Meraka and Associate Professor affiliated with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa. Since 2003, she has focused her research, in human-computer-interaction, on designing for rural settings and indigenous knowledge systems in Africa and Australia. To co-generate approaches that are locally accountable and grounded, she has lived rurally for the past few years in an African village.

Edwin Blake is a professor in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His research focus has been on information and Communications Technology for Development, User Experience as applied to Games, Virtual Environments and 3D Graphics as well as social aspects and networking.