Beyond Traditional Ethics when Developing Assistive Technology for and with Deaf People in Developing Regions - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 310

It must be noted, however, in making this technical design decision to increase
the generality of SignSupport to provide participant-driven scenarios, we are also
empowering the Deaf community even more to choose and prioritise more scenarios,
as well as the technical research agenda, in the future.

6 R e fl ection on Community-Based Co-design

So how participatory are we really? Motlhabi's ( 2014 ) pyramid of weight of infl u-
ence (see Fig. 10.4 ) represents an ideal situation, where the most input comes from
Deaf and pharmacy communities, then from a Deaf education and communication
specialist, to design engineers to computer scientists who did the programming.
Such participation would surely be 'strong' according to Anokwa et al. ( 2009 ) and
indicate a great deal of empowerment according to Michener ( 1998 ).
Yet the reality is that our participatory process lies somewhere between 'weak' and
'strong' (see Fig. 10.1 ), as we try to avoid the 'tyranny of participation' (Heeks 1999 ),
as described above. We, and here we means the researchers, clearly still possess a
great deal more sophistication in the ICT realm than our Deaf collaborators and must
endeavour to take actions to address this. To quote Dearden and Rizvi 2008 :
In creating a participatory approach to interactive systems design for development, it is
important to recognise participation as going beyond simply engaging people as informants
in design. Instead, participation must be framed as an ongoing engagement that supports
learning and development of a wide range of knowledge and transferable skills. The goals
of participation should be wider than the individual project and should aim for learning and
long term empowerment.

The technical, and indeed socio-economic and cultural, disparity between Deaf
participants and researchers will not likely change all that much despite the success
of the English literacy and ICDL training. As we are mostly computer scientists and
engineers pursuing technical research, we can only realistically attempt to address
the technical disparity while simultaneously attempting to minimise the power

more

Deaf people and pharmacists

Deaf education specialist

Design engineers

Weight of
suggestion

Computer
scientists

less

Fig. 10.4 Inverse pyramid of involvement: fact or fantasy? (Drawing adapted from Motlhabi
( 2014 ) to emphasise participation from the Deaf community)