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.