NUST's Indigenous Knowledge in Digital World Cluster — Co-Designing Digital Tools with Namibia's San and OvaHimba Communities

Since 2008, the Indigenous Knowledge in Digital World research cluster at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), led by Prof. Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, has co-designed digital technologies directly with San and OvaHimba communities in rural Namibia, treating community members as design partners from the outset rather than testing tools on them afterwards.

Peer-reviewed studies document San co-designers explicitly rejecting 'contemporary' interface conventions in favour of culturally relevant alternatives, and describe jointly built outputs including a digital 'innovation game' for community futuring, a VR prototype co-explored with a remote San community in the Kalahari, and participatory AI prototypes built with OvaHimba and San community members. In July 2025 this work led to a UNESCO Chair in Digital Technology Design with Indigenous People at NUST, launched via a 'Weaving Futures Knowledge Fair' in Windhoek that produced a knowledge exchange between Namibia's Ju/'hoansi San trackers and Tanzania's Hadzabe community using the CyberTracker app, and an Ocean Literacy Toolkit with the Topnaar community.

This is primarily a university research programme rather than a deployed public or commercial service: outputs are largely research prototypes tested with small numbers of participants in specific villages, not evaluated at population scale. The co-design methodology is well-established and peer-reviewed over 15+ years, but the UNESCO Chair itself is new and has no independent track record yet.