University of California, Irvine | nithyas@gmail.com
Microsoft Research India | nimmir@microsoft.com
Microsoft Research India | kentaro.toyama@microsoft.com
University of California, Irvine | nardi@ics.uci.edu
[ 1] Norman, D., Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books, 2000.
November + December 2009
[ 2] Sambasivan, N.,
Rangaswamy, N.,
Cutrell, E., Nardi, B.,
Ubicomp4D: Interaction
and Infrastructure
for International
Development—The
Case of Urban Indian
Slums, Ubicomp 2009.
interactions
HCI for Development (HCI4D) lies at the intersection of information communication technologies for development (ICT4D) and human-computer interaction (HCI). The mainstream HCI community creates user experiences for the developed-world consumer, while ICT4D is concerned about creating relevant technologies for developing nations. The fusion—HCI4D—evolved and realigned goals to design user experiences for a new audience, namely populations living in a context of low rates of telecom diffusion and digital literacy.
The foundation of good interaction design is understanding the user [ 1]. While usable interfaces are critical for good user experience, contextual factors such as institutional arrangements, literacy levels, and social, political, economic, and infrastructural issues often guide the usage and sustainability of development projects. In this regard, ethnography is a highly favored field technique in HCI4D research. This is due to the perspective it lends in gauging the sociocultural relevance and acceptability of technologies in a given context.
At the core of ethnographic research is field immersion of the researcher as a participant-observer. It follows that ethnographic studies are not only vulnerable to biases held by the researcher, but also are products of relationships established between the researcher and informants. Ethnography has historically involved power imbalances between researcher and informants. In the context of HCI4D, projects may fall into the trap of mistranslating findings into a
design irrelevant to the needs of target users in specific socioeconomic contexts, even with the best of intentions. Misreading cultures can disrupt the developmental underpinnings of HCI4D, which is concerned with technologies that move toward fulfilling human developmental goals. From our own experience in employing ethnographic methods in HCI4D, to avoid these traps:
Rearticulate the assumptions of developmen- 1. tal projects,
Outline a repertoire of field techniques 2. improvised for low-income settings, and
Highlight lessons learned from tensions 3. rooted in the conflicting cultural contexts of the HCI4D researcher and informants.
Our ideas developed out of field engagements between 2008 and 2009 in the slums of Bangalore, India, where we observed female domestic workers, and Mumbai, where we studied small businesses and their socioeconomic networks [ 2]. While our reflections are not new to the field of anthropology, we present ways to manage these age-old problems in the context of HCI4D. Some salient observations from our fieldwork are as follows:
Question the notion of development.
Understanding the meaning of development is critical to any developmental project. Broadly speaking, development as a goal addresses the necessities of human life, such as food, sanitation, health care, education, and employment. However, a critical component in strengthening the socio-economic and moral foundations of the project is to elicit the idea of development held by the target
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