Enhancing cross-cultural participation through creative visual exploration

Designers, like artists, fuse learned skills with intuition formed over their past experiences to unfold their creativity. Continuous interactions between the designers, their creations, and their informing and receiving environment lead to alignment and harmonisation. However, we observe that displaced designers in an unfamiliar context can no longer blindly rely on their insights only to create acceptable artefacts. In this paper we depict the journey of a young western designer, who accepted the challenge to co-design a 3D graphics visualisation of a small village in Southern Africa. We have observed that the 3D graphics visualisation has significantly increased participation and facilitated co-creation of meaning at the interface of different cultures rather than just being an end product. Not only do we he have to learn to 'see' what the village elders see but also experience a paradigm shift in design and evaluation methods. Based on personal interrelations and immanent differing principles the interactions among the participants are renegotiated continuously during the design process.