Heritage & Habitus: Designing to Support Situated, Living Knowledge

We refer to an ongoing endeavour aimed to assist Indigenous communities in Australian in persisting their personal and cultural memories linked to temporally dynamic interactions in situ. The design enables Indigenous users to upload items they collect themselves (e.g. photographs, audio, video) using mobile phones, in their traditional lands into a topographical simulation; and, then to associate these items with their own hand-drawn markings in the simulation. The design responds to the rich interconnectedness between Indigenous culture and the land and the need to converge spatial information technologies with practices that are not, inherently, conditioned by the geometries of the West. We propose that the design approach contributes to thinking about ways that mobile guides can respond to multiple realities and corporeal and affective phenomena.