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Going Beyond Empowered Design by Scaffolding Inter-community Engagement

When participatory technological design initiatives are focused on a very specific local context it becomes difficult to scale up their deployment to wider or different contexts. We have therefore extended the notion of empowered design and consequent technology appropriations and show that scaffolding, assistance that fades away, is a viable method to facilitate inter-community engagements with technology. This leads to technology appropriation by communities who did not participate in the original design, and they do this independently of the original academic design team. In this paper we report on our project process over an extended period of time. A collaborator and co-author on this paper is an elder from the original community who is acting to extend and adapt the technology with other, distant, communities from the same ethnic group, the ovaHimba. We particularly focus on the evolving role our collaborator took on over a number of field trips, and how our support, the scaffolding, became less and less important. His perspective is shared through translated statements and integrated into the text after our joint paper discussions.