UTM professors and
students visited Santos
Reyes Yucuná and
realized that before
any technology
solutions could be
designed, hearts and
minds had to be won.
a business model in which they
analyzed the women’s context to
identify productive projects that
might be viable. The team couldn’t
find any natural resources in the area
except for cornhusks, which are used
to feed donkeys. With cornhusks as
raw materials, the UTM team came
up with the idea to create flowers the
Yucuná women could assemble and sell.
The project grew with great
expectations. In two months the
women created their own brand,
Ita-Viko (“pretty woman”), and more
women got involved. The U TM team
provided training on entrepreneurial
skills and business savvy through
human-development workshops.
Ita-Viko has proved to be a
successful business venture. In their
first year, the women managed to
export their flowers, and during
the second year they diversified
their offerings, crafting earrings,
necklaces, and rings, all from
cornhusks. Ita-Viko created a real
alternative to the only way of life the
people of Santos Reyes Yucuná had
known for decades.
THEN THE ENACTUS-UTM
TEAM LEAVES
By Enactus bylaws, university teams
have to leave the projects in which
they participate. This meant that the
students and professors had to stop
coming regularly into the community
to teach the women how to create new
products, how to set prices, and how
to sell products online, and eventually
stop teaching them about human
development.
Further communication among the
team and Ita-Viko was allowed, but
Enactus-UTM couldn’t keep visiting
them on a regular basis. So, the next
predicament was born: How could we
support the women of Ita-Viko without
the ongoing help and presence of the
team?
Carlos Alberto Martínez, this
article’s co-author, was at the time
vice president of the Enactus-UTM
team. Also, he worked at the UsaLab
Laboratorio de Usabilidad in the
same university. UsaLab is a usability
laboratory that started in 2002 with the
goal of supporting HCI research in our
university. Since 2006, we have offered
services to industry as well. It is staffed
by professors and students, some of
them past winners at the ACM Student
Design Competition at CHI, CLIHC
(the Latin American HCI conference),
and MexIHC (the Mexican HCI
conference).
When the challenge of Enactus
leaving Ita-Viko came to our attention,
our first instinct and response was to
solve it by means of technology. But
a bigger question then arose: Was
technology a suitable way to reduce,
minimize, and support the lack of
communication among teams, even if
the women of Ita-Viko couldn’t read or
write Spanish, let alone use a computer?
Figure 1. Indigenous women from the community of Santos Reyes Yucuná, Oaxaca, users and participants in the contextual study.