We (local researchers, Indigenous communities, local stakeholders, and a researcher bridging the places) have worked together over the last two years, in the project Indigenous Climate Observatories, local knowledge for local action to define such observatories, what they become when practiced and what this could mean. They focus on understanding climate change from local perspectives. Each of the explorations started with a blanket, used as a meeting space to initiate conversation - a design seed. They all resulted in a blanket which can be seen as manifestations of each of the different Indigenous Climate Observatories, a boundary object. This pictorial will present the blankets, how they were made and the role they had in the process. The blankets were of great importance to ‘work knowledges together’ . By doing this weaving of knowledges, we accept diverse forms of knowledge systems as equitable and respectfully learn together to understand climate change through a multitude of perspectives.

This article explores the notion of "voice", weaving its literal and figurative meanings to examine how digital marketplaces alter the ways people interact. In many developing countries, individuals are often marginalized by these platforms, rendering voices unheard, unrecognized, and silenced. This is maintained within research, such that HCI overwhelmingly emphasizes WEIRD voices (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic). We show that an understudied consequence of digital marketplaces under this design paradigm is that traditional interactions between people become degraded or erased in pursuit of platform scalability, efficiency, and profit. Drawing on participatory workshops and ethnographic study in rural Malaysia, we listen to ways in which people in marketplaces describe how their literal voices are essential to both customary participation and cultural inclusion, but remain excluded from digital platforms. In doing so, we document associated voice files that illustrate the ways in which verbal social interaction, and its embodied knowledge and forms of inclusion, are transformed by the introduction of the digital into their daily lives.

We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, computer technologies are more and more able to understand the real world by the informational structure of meta-data. With the advent of new tools, the traditional distinction between culture and technology has become obsolete. In this paper, we will discuss different approaches to create mixed reality applications for Indigenous cultural preservation and also best practices of developing augmented and mixed reality systems in two different cultural contexts. We will describe several technical aspects of mobile devices, tangible user interfaces and context-sensitive services in information systems for museums and local communities developed at the researchers' affiliated institutions. Our initial evaluations show that the systems are engaging and encourage intergenerational knowledge exchange, thus have the potential to help in cultural preservation of partner communities.

The Penan people of Malaysian Borneo were traditionally nomads of the rainforest. They would leave messages in the jungle for each other by shaping natural objects into language tokens and arranging these symbols in specific ways -- much like words in a sentence. With settlement, the language is being lost as it is not being used by the younger generation. We report here, a tangible system designed to help the Penan preserve their unique object writing language. The key features of the system are that: its tangibles are made of real objects; it works in the wild; and new tangibles can be fabricated and added to the system by the users. Our evaluations show that the system is engaging and encourages intergenerational knowledge transfer and thus has the potential to help preserve this language.

The extinction of indigenous languages, which convey cultural worldviews, remains a continued threat to cultural heritage preservation. The nomadic Penans in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, have developed Oroo', their own forest sign language, to communicate with each other. Yet with recent developments the younger generations are drawn more to technology than engaging with their surrounding forest, only vaguely remembers few signs. In this paper, we present one of our initiatives to reintroduce Oroo' to the younger Penan generation by digital means. Under the auspices of a long term collaboration with the Long Lamai community we have developed and evaluated a first digital Oroo' adventure game for the children. Results show a general interest in digital games with indigenous Penan contents albeit with a slight learning curve only. The project efforts rely on local community's active participation and using indigenous wisdom as an essential component to digitalize and preserve the language further.