Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods
for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological
Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue
for improvements in environmental governance and socialenvironmental
justice. In this paper we show how we carried
out a usability engineering effort in the “wild” context
of the Congolese rainforest – designing, evaluating and iteratively
improving novel collaborative data collection interfaces
for non-literate forest communities that can subsequently
be used to facilitate communication and information
sharing with logging companies. Working in this context
necessitates adopting a thoroughly flexible approach to the
design, development, introduction and evaluation of technology
and the modes of interaction it offers. We show that we
have improved participant accuracy from about 75% towards
95% and provide a set of guidelines for designing and evaluating
ICT solutions in “extreme circumstances” – which hold
lessons for CSCW, HCI and ICT4D practitioners dealing with
similar challenges
