Recent developments in Virtual Reality (VR) applications, such as hand gesture tracking, provide new opportunities to create embodied user experiences. Numerous gesture elicitation studies have been conducted. However, in most instances they lack validation of implemented gestures, as well diversity of participant groups. Our research explores the digitalization of intangible cultural heritage in collaboration with one of the San tribes in Southern Africa. The focus is on particular gestures as embodied interactions of a VR implementation of a traditional San hunting story. In this paper, we present a gesture study, which entails an in-situ elicitation of natural gestures, a co-designed integration, a VR story implementation with grasping and three mid-air gestures, and a user evaluation. Based on our findings, we discuss the anthropological value of gesture implementations determined by an indigenous community, the local usability of a grasping gesture, and in-VR gesture elicitation, as an extension of existing methods.

This paper argues for a fusion between community-based co-design and futuring as an approach for alternative and innovative technology development in rural indigenous settings in Africa. We base our argument on theoretical propositions and two prior empirical project cases in Namibia that applied Community-based co-design and futuring. The cases focus on the co-design of a digital wildlife data collection tool and futuring of rural green energy use, highlighting the fundamental attributes and application of each approach in rural indigenous settings. In a critical stance, we accentuate the shortcomings of each approach and propose an alignment that transcends each approach from individual application to a collective alliance that enables rural indigenous technology innovation.

This paper presents the first instance and experience of futuring with a rural San community from the Kalahari desert in Donkerbos, Namibia. Over a series of sessions we explore divergent speculative design and design fiction methods to stimulate and invoke alternative green energy use cases. These alternatives are premised on the imagination of unorthodox green energy use, superseding interventionist energy use which is constantly propagated and mainstream. We showcase the application of speculative design and design fiction in challenging the dominant interventionist approach and singular temporal view, resulting in a dissentient dual temporality. As well as demonstrate its utility and inadequacies in transitioning an African rural indigenous community into the speculative, arguing for the appropriation and widening of futuring methods in an African context.

This paper, contributing to decolonial design and futuring practice, promotes and explores the recovery of lost futures of the past. Through a series of sessions in a rural indigenous community in Southern Africa, we employ the Chameleon Innovation game as a participatory and community-based ideation method to co-design alternative future innovations and possibilities. The game, as an avenue through which participants accentuate lost indigenous cultural practices from the past, extends an Afrocentric indigenous orientation and past trajectory, enabling participants to actively engage these practices and situate alternative futures. This widens the spectrum within which futures and technologies are co-designed, enabling community participants to actively conceptualise alternative, yet situated, innovations in rural indigenous contexts.

This paper presents the first instance and experience of futuring in two indigenous ovaHimba communities in northwest Namibia. Over a series of sessions, we, as part of a broad green energy access project, explore futuring to stimulate and invoke alternative green energy use cases. These alternatives are premised on the opposition of the dominant needs-based and interventionist approach and imagination of unorthodox green energy utilisation that supersedes mainstream, rudimentary and obvious energy use. We reflect on the application of futuring, particularly speculative design, in an indigenous context, highlighting the communities’ back-looking future perspective, and relevance and influence of ancestry and culture over the future. As well as accentuate the friction towards speculative design, arguing for its appropriation and alignment to a more grounded design approach. Moreover, we indicate the agency that it provides, allowing local participants to re-evaluate their values and practices and simultaneously determine the integration of technology into the future.

In recent years, the need for affordable sustainable housing has increased. At the same time, there has been a gradual rising interest in compact living. With the mounting impacts of climate change, a new way of thinking is needed to develop more resilient and climate responsive ways of living that are compact, affordable, and climate-conscious. In response to this need, the idea of a ‘Z-Free Home’ was born. The ‘Z-Free Home’ is a tiny mobile house equipped with essential passive and eco-cycle systems that achieves nine zero targets. The main design and construction concept is based on circular design and a return to nature life cycle principles. In this paper, the architectural design concept, building energy modelling, and simulation for the Z-Free Home design proposal is discussed. This paper describes the concept design and design development phases together with building modelling and simulation. A focus was made on the use of virtual reality in design development assessment as a new method for evaluating passive and eco-cycle systems. The results show that it’s possible to achieve nine different zero goals while the analysis illustrates the challenges in achieving them. The paper also described the next steps planned for the proof of concept, i.e., the 1:1 house model. The project is ongoing, and it aims at a full-scale physical prototype as a proof of concept for the zero targets. The ‘Z-Free Home’ is designed for the cold Swedish climate but could be more widely applicable in other mild climates as well as hot climates.