At the time of finalizing this text we are on a good way to reach most of the goals suggested in the project plan: A in depth literature research was done by all members of the group and a summary of the topics discussed in these papers is in the process of being finalized. While we initially concentrated on the historical background of the different TK systems (where such information could be found), now there is also a lot of technical information included in the literature reviews.
Furthermore the website has been enhanced, and a “wiki” collaboration was started on the ILIAS platform of the FH Cologne.
We also made further progress on the proposed practical experiments, but at least in the case of the Spirulina experiment, results are negative (see experiments part of this text). The work on the other proposed experiments still continues however.
Due to the lack of progress in the original plan to create a building concept consisting of our individual TK systems and general concerns regarding the overall focus of our semester-project (see lessons learned), we started a comprehensive re-evaluation of the main objectives.
At this point a rough re-orientation has been completed and it’s general outline is already presented in this text. In addition a brainstorm concerning a DSS (see methods) has been done, and we expect to have at least a simple outline of the needed concepts soon.
Development of the semester-project / lessons learned
When looking at the development of this semester-project one can also identify several points where the same processes occurred which might have let to difficulties in the implementation of other TK based projects. During the initial planning phase a very general idea was put forward and agreed upon to work with the concept of community and/or traditional knowledge. This was inspired by some seemingly successful projects we had heard about, like the Barefoot colleges in India. But at that point the overall level of information was low and it also seemed like these concepts were highly promising but underutilized in development cooperation. In retrospect one has to admit however that to a certain extent we still had an what El Berr (2007) calls an
idealizing concept of TK.
During the second phase the idea was to conduct some research in the general literature concerning TK related concepts and their prior use. Relatively quickly it became clear, that those concepts were not quite as underutilized as we had originally thought. Not only had there been many previous projects spanning back several decades, but also a some dedicated research concerning the use of TK and the issues related to it (see introduction).
At this point however, we did not consider these concerns as really related to us or our idea of the semester-project and continued to narrow down what could become a successful project proposal. One of the main issues was that we now realized that the general idea how you could define TK or related concepts was not nearly as clear as initially thought. In the research literature one can find myriads of different definitions (see definition) and the topics one can find TK about span to about almost every research field imaginable .
As many western researchers before, we as a groups of engineers and natural scientists, therefore decided to focus on the technical aspects which seemed the most easily accessible and also transferable concepts. Thus without completely realizing it, we stayed in the tradition of western science, trying to get some “technical instructions” or “codified knowledge” out of TK. To a certain extent this was of course also due to the limitations we had having only secondary data sources about most of the TK we were interested in at that point. But one can already tell that in many ways the development of our semester-project had similarities with the history of TK concepts in development cooperation. During the further course of the semester-project, maybe due to difficulties in implementing some of the experimental projects we had set out to conduct, or maybe because of further more in depth literature research, we slowly came to the realization that TK is a much more complicated concept than we originally envisioned.