A tent, a pigeon house, and a pomegranate tree

Abstract

An eight-day HCI summer school was run by Kingston University for designing technologies to document intangible culture heritage (ICH) in North-Central Egypt. The school was part of the UK-Egypt institutional link, the Hilali Network, a Newton-Mosharafa project between the City for Scientific Research and Technology Applications (SRTA-City) and Kingston University. The link aimed at advancing HCI education in Egypt by training 18 engineering students from Alexandria University to engage in technology design activities with members from the Bedouin community of Borg El-Arab. The curriculum used interactive material, emphasizing hands-on practice and learning by doing. The Double Diamond design process model was used by the UK. Design Council to structure the school activity. It is a four-stage model, Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver, with every two phases forming a diamond shape. In the first stage, Discover, the students were encouraged to take a conceptual leap from being the engineering student, who is used to solving well-defined problems, to becoming a design thinker, who is co-responsible with the users for framing the design within the sociocultural challenges. In the second stage, Define, the students were divided into teams. Each team had to define the scope of their projects. In the Develop phase, the students used personas to describe their target users as they defined them in the previous stage. They analyzed the data they gathered from the interviews to find insights and identify opportunity areas, and brainstormed to generate ideas about potential solutions.