Red Line

Today I had three visitors at my home. I find it very inspirational to have discussions by the terrace (the pool is not very far away). The longest one – almost four hours – was with Margaret Angula, from UNAM. She works in Geography and Urban/Rural Sociology and studies for a PhD at University of Cape Town.

Margaret had had earlier today a Skype call with my team at Turku. Together, we are exploring how smart phones could help even illiterate subsistence farmers to cope with the changing climate. In my own team, we have worked on the topic for quite some years, with farmers in Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania, trying to co-design an app that the farmers really would like to use and see the benefit from. So that the co-design process would not just result in a few scholarly papers and PhDs.

While Margaret agreed that co-designing the app within a real setting, a farmers’ community (which are getting older because the youth are moving to cities, as from European rural areas), would be essential, she also emphasised that the bottom-up approach should be complemented, in parallel, with a top-down exercise, with MPs.

Margaret’s point was that the app(s) should promote awareness. Awareness of the changing climate and what everyone can do for fighting it. And then was the time for my lesson.

Margaret said that there should be only one app, to be used by illiterate farmers and highly educated MPs alike.

So no adaptation according to the users? No profiling? No smart user interface?

No. Because the one app should help the MPs see the realities that people at the grassroots are struggling with, when they see their farmland dying, their cattle taken to butcheries at low prices, because of no water.

The one app that might need to be cross-designed by teams of people from different backgrounds so that they could see the common, shared challenge. Becoming aware, together.

Margaret told about divisions in Namibia. In some way, besides a very concrete boundary, a symbol of divisions is the Red Line (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Namibia)). It is a border, within the country, that divides the land into that of subsistence farming for local markets, and that of commercial farming for approved exports.

Although there are reasons for the Red Line, as explicated in its other name of veterinary cordon fence, the line separates not only cows or sheep from their peers on the other side. Take for example the observations on drought. South of the Line, we have scientists with our explanations. North of the Line, people explain the phenomenon by the sin that caused God’s punishment.

Margaret told me that she contextualises the Southern science to her relatives in the North: yes, God asked people to protect the land, which apparently did not happen; a cross of scientific and faith-oriented explanation. And what happened: her relatives said that people in even further North should repent and start protecting the land. No more inevitable fate. In a way, her relatives turned into global activists.

Yes, we need a one app for all, instead of adapted solutions for people in different sides of all red and other lines.

And I cannot publish this entry without telling about her soon 99 years old Grandmother (based on Margaret’s stories, she might a climate activist as well – but I did not ask). She hates technology. She calls a smart phone a gossiper because within a few seconds all her stories are shared and modified by people hundreds of miles away.

Her way to refer to fake news and disinformation, at the other side of the Red Line.

Yes, we need one app.

PS. Today I saw, at my yard, one of these animals that even the owner of my house did not remember the name of. One of the things that she did remember, though, was that the animal might carry rabies. Earlier I have been afraid of dogs, but maybe there are aliens more frightening than canines.