Cosmovision Of Data: An Indigenous Approach to Technologies for Self-Determination

This paper analyses practices of data perception and usage, as well as ongoing and envisioned community technology projects carried out by a Masewal Indigenous group in Mexico through their union of cooperatives, Tosepan. Through fieldwork interviews, Masewal participants expressed how they have been appropriating existing technologies for their people’s self-determination. During a workshop, they imagined how diverse knowledges and lived experiences of their worldview, passed down through generations, could be represented and translated into digital practices more broadly. We draw considerations for the HCI community to embrace novel approaches to data and information systems from the community’s concept of Cosmovision, and develop Micro-, Meso- and Macro- lenses within it. Through these lenses, we discuss how technologies could be designed for specific individual practices and connections with nature (Micro-cosmos) while supporting communal actions for autonomy and self-determination (Meso-cosmos), and considering broader worldmaking processes and implications for identity, prosperity, ecology and plural representations (Macro-cosmos).