Participatory Design for the Anarchive: The Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures Documentation Project

TY - CHAP

T1 - Participatory Design for the Anarchive

T2 - 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference: Nowhere and Everywhere, DIS 2021

AU - Turner, Hannah

AU - Gibson, Laura

AU - Gimenez-Delgado, Clara

N1 - Funding Information: The seven Zulu community experts who had come together as part of Dr. Gibson’s dissertation work were curious about seeing the practices of the institution, reconnecting some of the knowledge with objects and finding a way to bring these findings back to KwaZulu-Natal. In 2017, Dr. Gibson and Dr. Turner were able to secure funding from a Wenner Gren Foundation grant to enable the visit to happen, and in 2019, secured increased funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund at the University of Leicester. This work culminated in April 2019, when a small group—including Zulu experts, academics and the MiaB team—prepared for the first visit to the SAM’s collections. For some, this was their first visit to Cape Town, which meant a mixture of excitement and nervousness, and all the challenges that come with collaborative work. Our challenge as academics would be to support the desires of the experts and try to remain useful in our obligation, to document the objects that the experts chose and to work with Museum in a Box to design a mobile exhibit that would fit the community’s needs. On a Tuesday morning in April 2019, following the previous evening’s Welcome Dinner in Cape Town, we began the first part of our programme at the Iziko Social History Centre. Leaving the hotel in the morning, we were a group of 12, and we were eager to enter into the museum collections and to work with the staff there. We were all excited about potentially shifting or adding knowledge to the museum’s records about a small collection of Zulu items, and we were curious about how we could best return that knowledge back to the KwaZulu-Natal community. Funding Information: This project was generously supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) at the University of Leicester. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Owner/Author. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/6/28

Y1 - 2021/6/28

N2 - This paper documents the collaborative design project: "Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures: Understanding Zulu History and Language with Zulu-Speaking Communities and Their Belongings."With eight Zulu experts, and the company Museum in a Box [32], we collaborated to create an oral history documentation project that focuses on the belongings at the Iziko South African Museum (SAM). Using the Museum in a Box tool, we created a movable, audio-based exhibit that compiled stories and images of objects from the SAM, for use back in the community in KwaZulu-Natal. This paper documents our shared process and considers the development of this exhibit and documentation project as a kind of participatory anarchive or counter archive [20, 41]. We connect practices and theories in participatory design with those in museum studies and archival studies; and show the productive tensions that exist in an experimental, community-engaged oral history documentation project.

AB - This paper documents the collaborative design project: "Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures: Understanding Zulu History and Language with Zulu-Speaking Communities and Their Belongings."With eight Zulu experts, and the company Museum in a Box [32], we collaborated to create an oral history documentation project that focuses on the belongings at the Iziko South African Museum (SAM). Using the Museum in a Box tool, we created a movable, audio-based exhibit that compiled stories and images of objects from the SAM, for use back in the community in KwaZulu-Natal. This paper documents our shared process and considers the development of this exhibit and documentation project as a kind of participatory anarchive or counter archive [20, 41]. We connect practices and theories in participatory design with those in museum studies and archival studies; and show the productive tensions that exist in an experimental, community-engaged oral history documentation project.

KW - Anarchive

KW - Museum

KW - Oral History

KW - Participatory Design

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85110240246&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3461778.3462129

DO - 10.1145/3461778.3462129

M3 - Conference paper

AN - SCOPUS:85110240246

T3 - DIS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference: Nowhere and Everywhere

SP - 1783

EP - 1792

BT - DIS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Y2 - 28 June 2021 through 2 July 2021

ER -