Preservation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge

A tribe-centred digital platform to preserve the ethnomedicinal plant knowledge of Mahadev Koli and Thakar tribe.

Overview

Work

Academic Project | 2025 | 4 months

Connection

Tribal knowledge holders to a future where their wisdom survives, reaches the right hands, and stays protected.

Team

Individual

Role

UX & UI Design | Social Design | UX Research

The Problem

Generations of ethnomedicinal knowledge held by the Mahadev Koli and Thakar tribes are eroding. Younger members are disengaging, elders fear exploitation, and no trusted system exists to document it safely. When these elders are gone, the knowledge goes with them.

No trusted system → Knowledge stays undocumented
Elders fear exploitation → Won't share
Youth disengaging → Gap widens

Locked in elders memory → lost within a generation.

The Opportunity

The real opportunity was never just documentation. Field research revealed that tribal healers are willing to share their knowledge, but only when it is protected from misuse and separated from commercial extraction.

This reframes the entire design challenge: not a tool for recording, but a platform for building trust between communities and external stakeholders.

The Solution

A tribe-centric digital platform designed to ethically record, protect, and share this wisdom, built around community consent, biopiracy safeguards, and interfaces accessible to both elders and youth.

The platform is not a repository. It is a guided experiential journey.