Community Support: Lessons in Co-Designing Otherwise, Together in Cairo

Co-design experiences are often challenging to expose multidisciplinary students and early-stage researchers to. It requires significant resources, support, and, above all, community collaborators who share a vision and are willing to embark on that journey together. In the lead-up to the AfriCHI conference of 2025, held in Cairo, Egypt, a group of organisers from Egypt and across the African continent decided to host a co-design experience to support students on their co-design journey. This follows successful iterations of similar events at previous AfriCHI and Participatory Design Conferences. We sought to shift the approach slightly, moving from a summer school format to one embedded within the local ways of knowing and exploring. Since Cairo has a robust and vibrant museum culture, exemplified by the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, the largest museum dedicated to a single civilisation, we decided to use this as a useful context for co-design exploration.