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Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge, Collaboration, and Emergent Technology

Format: Papers, RSD10, Topic: Culture & Society, Topic: Socioecological Design

Twisha Mehta and Jenny Bentley

How to embrace tensions in conservation interventions in a vulnerable Himalayan region

Our case study is set in Lachen, a remote village in an ecologically vulnerable Himalayan region in Sikkim, India. Numerous conservation initiatives have been planned and implemented in the region but didn’t necessarily succeed due to the cultural, political and geographical complexities of the place. As a team of designers and an anthropologist, we tackle these complexities through a systems thinking approach, one that has led to designing an interpretation centre in the region via co-creation. In the initial stages of our project, we found tensions in perspectives and values within the system that drove us to seek innovative ways to embrace these paradoxes by using ethnographic methodologies and emergent technologies to rapidly reconstruct relations in this system. Through this paper, we ask how we can measure the impact of this resilient model and how we can find ways of improved mutual communication between the multidisciplinary collaborators in order to enhance understanding of the modalities of a systems thinking design approach.

Keywords: conservation, Himalayas, systems thinking, indigenous knowledge, emergent technologies

Citation Data

Author(s): Twisha Mehta and Jenny Bentley
Year:
Title: Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge, Collaboration, and Emergent Technology
Published in: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
Volume:
Article No.:
URL: https://rsdsymposium.org/
Host:
Location:
Symposium Dates:
First published: 3 September 2021
Last update:
Publisher Identification:

Copyright Information

Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (ISSN 2371-8404) are published annually by the Systemic Design Association, a non-profit scholarly association leading the research and practice of design for complex systems: 3803 Tønsberg, Norway (922 275 696).

Attribution

Open Access article published under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form according to the licence terms.

Suggested citation format (APA)

Author(s). (20##). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD##. Article ##. rsdsymposium.org/LINK

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Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design are published online and include the contributions for each format.

Papers and presentations are entered into a single-blind peer-review process, meaning reviewers see the authors’ names but not vice versa. Reviewers consider the quality of the proposed contribution and whether it addresses topics of interest or raises relevant issues in systemic design. The review process provides feedback and possible suggestions for modifications.

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Editor: Cheryl May
Advisors:
Peter Jones
Ben Sweeting

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In 2022, the Systemic Design Association adopted the scholar's spiral—a cyclic non-hierarchical approach to advance scholarship—and in 2023, launched Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal. Together, the RSD symposia and Contexts support the vital emergence of supportive opportunities for scholars and practitioners to publish work in the interdisciplinary field of systemic design.

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