‘Illahee’ - a Chinook jargon word for place or world. To us, Illahee is an idea of an all-encompassing relationship that ties the people of a place to the land and each other. With Illahee, we hope to foster sovereignty and build reciprocity with the people who embody traditional knowledge systems to protect the environment we all inhabit.
This design research proposes the question of how a digital outdoor recreation tool could support Indigenous sovereignty through community engagement and embodied user learning. Our proposed digital tool, Illahee, is a placemaking outdoor recreation application with embodied interaction provided through guided audio-visual channels. Illahee aims to promote ecological awareness of and engagement with Indigenous history, culture, traditional knowledge systems and sovereignty efforts.
Competitive Analysis
User Testing
Conducting Interviews
Design Input
Ricardo Garza
Zoe Regan
Samantha Wanamaker
9 weeks
Miro
InVision
Figma
Wix
We looked for competitors that specialized in hiking/outdoor exercise apps, audio tour apps, and in indigenous placemaking. We chose 5 competitors: AllTrails, Strava, Anytour, VoiceMap, and Whose Land. All have Android and iOS mobile apps, while AllTrails, Strava, VoiceMap, and Whose Land have desktop sites that provide the portion of the features present in the mobile apps.
We conducted a preliminary analysis of features we would like to include in our proposed application and a secondary analysis on web and mobile navigational structure, tour/trail finding capabilities, GPS/map navigation, and overall use satisfaction of each competitor. The competitive analysis helped us understand marketplace opportunity and research precedents and also helped guide the initial design of our application.
Selections for our literature review focused on existing research that engaged with our primary research question: how can a digital outdoor recreation tool become a catalyst for sovereignty through community engagement and user learning?
Scholarly works were selected through keyword searches and reviewed for relevance and appropriate precedents.
Additionally, the seminal work by Indigenous environmental scholar and activist Winona LaDuke was reviewed and served as an important contextual resource in understanding how placemaking and naming, traditional knowledge systems and environmental stewardship connect in Indigenous sovereignty efforts.
Placemaking, as defined by Wikipedia, is the “multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people's health, happiness, and well-being.”
The approach of placemaking is a core principle in contemporary Indigenous sovereignty efforts - the reclaiming of ancestral lands and the traditional resources therein through activism and policy centered on independent management.
In her landmark book, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (1999), author Winona LaDuke explores the plurality of Indigenous placemaking. From the Klamath, Modoc, Yahooskin Paiute, Karuk, Yurok and Hupa tribes of the Klamath river basin working to restore stewardship of sickened rivers to the tribal communities to the reclamation of horsemanship and homelands by the Nez Perce tribes, placemaking is as diverse as the tribal nations of this continent. In order to support these efforts, each experience must be approached with a nuanced understanding of place and community.
Place naming, a specific type of placemaking, is another approach to sovereignty awareness and activism. From land acknowledgement statements to traditional greetings and name sharing, Indigenious language is a powerful vehicle for identity reclamation. The ‘renaming’ of place, particularly sacred places, “inscribe the landscape with meaning” (Gray & Rück, 2019) and challenge accepted colonial narratives about the land and its inhabitants.
What if placemaking and place naming, as it relates to Indigenious sovereignty efforts, could take the form of a digital tool for all those experiencing a place, Indigenious or otherwise? Could this tool support cross-cultural education and awareness? Could this tool support sovereignty efforts and ultimately influence public policy?
The role of HCI in digital placemaking has been thoroughly researched and documented by HCI researcher Clara Crivellaro and her colleagues in two key research works: Contesting the City: Enacting the Political Through Digitally Supported Urban Walks (2015) and Re-Making Places: HCI, ‘Community Building’ and Change (2016).
In ‘Contesting the City: Enacting the Political Through Digitally Supported Urban Walks’, Crivellaro, et al. explore how “situated discovery” and “articulation of issues at the intersection between the politics of place making and city planning” can challenge normative representations of place and give voice to marginalized narratives. (Crivellaro et al., 2015, pg. 2966)
Crivellaro, et al. suggest that allowing for everyday actions, uses and interactions to drive interrogations of singular histories inherently contributes to a plurality of experiences. This plurality is key in dismantling ahistorical assumptions that uphold capitalist-colonialist ideology and white supremacy and central to our design research.
In Re-Making Places: HCI, ‘Community Building’ and Change, a publication from the following year, Crivellaro, et al. dig into how the intervention of “prevailing, normative practices and existing spatial configurations in order to support the articulation of values, issues and open up the conditions of possibility,” with the paramount importance of embodied storytelling explained:
“Stories find their value not in their claims to legitimate truths about community and place. Instead, it’s in their uncertain and open-ended nature, and in how they emerge through varied, situated encounters and contingent situations, that they posit an “equality of intelligence” (rather than ‘sanctioned’ knowledge)]. That they are plural, situated, partial and contingent doesn’t discount them, rather it’s this that allows them to contain the possibilities for the future.” (Crivellaro et al., 2016, pg. 2966)
The concept of pluralistic storytelling as a reframing of history is a core tenet of the initial design approaches to Illahee.
Re-Making Places also stresses the ‘centrality of physicality and the need for HCI design to adopt methods and approaches to engage with embodied practices and sensorial aspects of places,” (p2967) where “material engagements in place making, socio-political issues, lived experiences and practices are brought to the fore and given form.”(Crivellaro et al., 2015, pg. 2967) The cohesion of physical experience and storytelling aligns with proposed Indigienous forms of embodiment discussed in the next section.
In Culturally Sensible Digital Place-Making: Design of the Mediated XicanIndio Resolana, authors Martínez, et al. discuss theoretical and educational needs of decolonized design as well as lessons learned from their community based design research for the Mediated XicanIndio Resolana, a cultural education interface that engages participants through embodied interaction and community storytelling.
While the theoretical foundation of this work is critical for the development of decolonized HCI, most relevant to our research is the importance of embodied interaction and the role this interaction in building “understanding of indigenious community knowledge systems for indigenious ways of learning.” (Martinez et al., 2010, pg. 165)
For the purposes of understanding how digital placemaking and storytelling could support sovereignty efforts, it is critical that the method of learning “take place through embodied and lived experience.” (Martinez et al., 2010, pg. 165)
Most interestingly, Martinez, et al. posit that beyond indigenous knowing, there is indegnious being - a reflection of the local community requiring presence of the local community, through a practice of interaction with others within the context of a situated environment. This practice of indigenious being is central to our design research: situating first person or testimonio storytelling within an associated ecological environment as a practice of reciprocity and accountability.
Martinez, et al. emphasize the critical nature of participatory design by local Indigenous communities - learning is often considered a sacred act (p. 168) and the expository nature of sharing ‘knowledge’ with unwilling or unengaged audiences could be extractionary and deeply harmful. The concept of sovereignty must extend to how and what knowledge is shared - and how that learning is received.
We conducted one on one semi-structured interviews with participants to collect feedback to help us better understand our problem and focus our efforts. Of note, we solicited feedback from both BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and non-BIPOC participants. This effort was to ensure Indigenous representation and perspectives in our design, as well as account for non-BIPOC perspectives.
By recording our observations along a set of inductively coded categories in our affinity diagram, we ultimately organized our interview findings into four themes:
We included contextual inquiry in our interviews to better gather initial design impressions from participants and better understand what future users might expect to see in our application. The contextual inquiry utilized a digital narrative which provided visual information, as well as sharing information about some of the features of the application such as placemaking, environmentalism, and the goal of fostering sovereignty.
View digital narrative HERE
We created our low fidelity wireframes based on our sketches created in Invision. The sketches allowed us to visualize our design concepts and as we worked on the low fidelity prototype in Figma we made changes and improvements. For the most part, the sketches translated well and we kept most of the design concepts intact. We felt confident in our design and the direction we were heading in.
We implemented A/B testing in order to test two different designs of the GPS navigation screen and narration screen. Prototype one utilized switching between a full screen navigation screen and full screen narration screen. Prototype two utilized a split screen where navigation and narration resided in one screen.
Overall, users liked the concept of the application and the general design. A benefit of switching to high fidelity was the ability to add images. We added images to trail locations to give the user a better sense of the trail locations and their environments.
Crivellaro, C., Comber, R., Dade-Robertson, M., Bowen, S. J., Wright, P. C., & Olivier, P. (2015). Contesting the City. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702176
Crivellaro, C., Taylor, A., Vlachokyriakos, V., Comber, R., Nissen, B., & Wright, P. (2016). Re-Making Places. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858332
Friedman, B. (2017). Survey Of Value Sensitive Design Methods. NOW Publishers.
Gray, C. (2021, March 31). Reclaiming Indigenous Place Names. Yellowhead Institute. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2019/10/08/reclaiming-indigenous-place-names/.
LaDuke, W. (2017). Recovering the sacred: the power of naming and claiming. Haymarket Books.
Manuel, J., & Crivellaro, C. (2020). Place-Based Policymaking and HCI. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376158
Martinez, C., Kemp, R., Birchfield, D., Campana, E., Ingalls, T., & Gkisedtanamoogk. (2010). Culturally sensible digital place-making. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction - TEI '10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1709886.1709915