having been exposed to HCI. As such, in connection with the broader implications for HCI education in the developing world, involving local undergraduates from developing regions in our international-development projects is one way to provide them with meaningful exposure to HCI that they are unlikely to have otherwise. The process also gives them an outlet for their creativity and ambition to achieve.

I encourage other researchers, educators, and professionals in our community to explore similar symbiotic arrangements. Our efforts may not be on the same scale as formal institutionalized approaches to HCI education in the developing world, but they may nevertheless contribute to local capacity building in HCI and facilitate eventual adoption into mainstream curricula. More important, we set the stage for nurturing the next generation of HCI practitioners who can contribute to the growth of our community with a more diverse international outlook. In doing so, we lay the foundation for HCI to become a more positive force in economic development.

July + August 2008

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ABOUT ThE AUThOr Matthew Kam is a Ph.D. candidate from the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Berkeley Institute of Design. His dissertation focuses on e-learning games on cell phones that target language and literacy learning in the developing world. He has previously studied a microfi-nance transaction technology in Uganda.

NGO partners with maturity is the most essential quality. For example, enlisting the support of community leaders such as the village priest is instrumental to encouraging participation from the village community in our user studies. While our NGO partners had to introduce us to these leaders at the beginning, language barriers had prevented me from developing these relationships to the fullest extent. In the end, it was the local undergraduates in my team who helped by liaising tactfully and professionally with the community stakeholders in their native languages.

Once the priest was convinced about the educational potential of the prototypes that we were testing, he became our strongest champion. He added that if we were willing to conduct our technology trials with the children in his village for the next 10 years, he would personally convince their parents to support their ongoing participation. Given his influence as a religious figure in this predominantly Hindu village, his vote of confidence meant a lot to the success of our project there.

We not only had to manage relationships with adults in the community, but also needed to establish rapport with the children themselves. One issue arose when the children at one of the rural schools wanted to take us to visit the temple in their village. In fact, they became angry with us and lost their enthusiasm for the user study until we obliged them. On our way to the temple, the children insisted that we skirt around a part of the village that was inhabited by some of their classmates who are

“dalits” (i.e., the “untouchables” caste). The local undergraduates in my team knew about the cultural implications behind this action; they decided that on our return journey, the team should walk through the area inhabited by the dalits. This gesture cheered up the children from the dalit caste who were upset that their peers wanted us to avoid their residences and helped to promote a more inclusive atmosphere in our user study.

That is not to claim that local team members never encounter barriers when interacting with end-user communities. However, local team members are argu-ably more informed about the local culture to work around these obstacles. At one time, for example, we carried out contextual studies of the traditional games that children play in the villages, so that we could design e-learning games patterned after these games. It was the local undergraduates who first noticed that the children showed us only the urban games in India. It seemed that games were a marker of social identity, such that our young informants feared that we, as urban dwellers, might look down on their village games. The local undergraduates finally coaxed the children to reenact how they play their everyday games by enthusiastically describing the village games that my team knew about.

From the larger perspective, human-computer interaction is only beginning to take root in the mainstream undergraduate curriculum in India and many other so-called developing countries. Most students would therefore graduate and enter the workplace or graduate school without