Ubuntu as Methodology: Beyond Philosophy into Practice

Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people — has become one of the most widely cited concepts in Southern African intellectual life. It appears in constitutional preambles, corporate value statements, design thinking workshops, and academic conference keynotes. Yet for all its discursive visibility, Ubuntu remains remarkably undertheorised as a practical methodology. It is invoked as a spirit, an ethos, a principle — but rarely as an operational framework that structures how research is conducted, how design decisions are made, or how authorship and benefit are distributed.

This gap between philosophy and practice is not trivial. When Ubuntu remains at the level of aspiration, it risks becoming what Mekoa (2023) describes as a ‘decorative citation’ — something added to the introduction of a research paper to signal cultural awareness, without fundamentally altering the extractive dynamics of the research itself. Mekoa’s work on decolonising participatory research through Ubuntu argues that genuine Ubuntu-informed practice requires a restructuring of power relations, not merely a rhetorical acknowledgement of communal values.

The Conference Room and the Community

Recent scholarship has begun to address this gap directly. At the ACM Participatory Design Conference in 2024, two papers brought Ubuntu methodology into sharp focus. Alharthi et al.’s “Embracing Ubuntu: Mapping Communal Ecologies in PD for HCI Practice” proposed a framework for mapping the relational networks that sustain communal knowledge production, arguing that participatory design must account not just for individual users but for the ecological web of relationships in which those users are embedded. The paper demonstrated how Ubuntu’s relational ontology — its insistence that persons are constituted through relationships rather than existing as autonomous agents — challenges the user-centred design paradigm at its foundation.

A companion paper, “Transformative Narratives: Fostering Ubuntu-Inspired PD Practices,” extended this argument by examining how narrative methods can serve as vehicles for Ubuntu-informed design. Rather than treating community members as data sources whose stories are extracted and coded, the authors proposed a model in which storytelling itself becomes the design methodology — where the act of sharing narratives in community generates the insights that shape design outcomes.

“Ubuntu is not a design principle to be applied. It is a way of being in relationship that restructures who designs, for whom, and to what end.”

What the Practical Gap Looks Like

The practical gap in applying Ubuntu principles to design is evident at every stage of the research process. Consider the standard participatory design workshop. A research team enters a community, facilitates a session, collects data, and returns to the university to analyse and publish findings. Even when the workshop is carefully designed, respectful, and genuinely participatory in its methods, the underlying structure remains extractive: knowledge flows from community to institution, and the institutional actors retain control over how that knowledge is represented, interpreted, and disseminated.

An Ubuntu-informed process would look fundamentally different. It would begin not with a research question formulated in an office, but with a relationship — an ongoing, reciprocal engagement with a community that precedes any specific project. The community would participate not just in generating data but in framing the questions, determining the methods, interpreting the results, and deciding how and where findings are shared. Authorship would be collective by default. Benefit would flow back to the community as a condition of the research, not as an afterthought.

An Active Area of Inquiry

It is important to be honest about where this work stands. Ubuntu-informed design methodology is an active area of research, not yet a codified framework. There is no established toolkit, no step-by-step guide, no certified methodology that practitioners can adopt wholesale. This is partly because Ubuntu itself resists codification — it is a living philosophy, not a static set of rules, and its application necessarily varies across contexts, communities, and relationships.

But the absence of a codified framework is not an absence of progress. Across Southern Africa and in diaspora communities globally, researchers and designers are experimenting with Ubuntu-informed approaches: community-led design processes in Khayelitsha, collaborative textile projects in rural KwaZulu-Natal, digital storytelling initiatives that place narrative control in the hands of participants. These experiments are generating a body of practice knowledge that, over time, will coalesce into more robust methodological frameworks.

The challenge — and the opportunity — is to document these experiments rigorously, to share failures as openly as successes, and to resist the temptation to package Ubuntu methodology as a neat, exportable product. Ubuntu-informed design must remain as relational, contextual, and alive as Ubuntu itself.