Interactions - November/December 2009 - Borrowing, Heavily, From Outside Disciplines (Page 23)

EDITOR Gary Marsden gaz@acm.org

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Nithya Sambasivan is a second-year doctoral student in informatics at he University of California, Irvine. She has a master’s degree in human-computer interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree in electronics and com- munication engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India. Her current projects include employment of participatory digital video for information exchange between slum communities and investigation of information flows in the informal sector of India. She has co-organized three workshops on HCI4D at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Her research experience includes summer internships at Microsoft Research India, Nokia Research Center, IBM Watson Center, and Accenture Technology Labs.

cal manifestations of income such as domestic appliances or a scooter may furnish vital data. It also provides opportunities for conversations of exchange, rather than difference.

Mind the gap. As noted earlier, there are inherent power differences between the interviewer and study participants (income, social class, language, skin color, appearance, and so on). Efforts to reduce this gap are imperative. As standard ethnographic practice, it helps to level differences by adopting appropriate posturing: sitting on the floor, wearing traditional clothes, sharing a meal, and revealing genuine concern for the informant, all of which aids in generating engaged and deep responses.

Reflections also point to “keeping the gap” despite the asymmetry of social status. Informants narrating from within a patron-client relationship, consisting of the researchers and themselves, may open up deep personal accounts of critical community issues, creating a feel for community dynamics. For instance, a group of foreign visitors accompanied us to one of our field sites. As the first author was a native ethnographer who had established sufficient rapport with the community, a couple of women volunteered to host the group. The visitors were welcomed with great enthusiasm and cheer. Drinks and sweetmeats were offered. While talking with pride about their financial independence and ability to support their children’s education, the women openly criticized their endurance of drinking and the ensuing violence of their husbands. Surprisingly, what took us months to uncover was unraveled within minutes in front of a group of people with foreign, power-laden identities. The particular asymmetric “ presentation of identity” in the field led to interesting revelations.

With this article, we hope to have highlighted the problems of conflicting cultural contexts between the researcher and the researched and their impact on development research. We discussed creative ethnographic engagements with informants that can potentially transcend gaps in the field to provide a foundation for good HCI4D research.

Nimmi Rangaswamy is an associate researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. A social scientist with a background in social anthropology, she received her master’s in philosophy from the Delhi School of Economics and Ph.D. from the

University of Mumbai. Her doctoral thesis analyzed a variety of print propaganda in Tamil politics as examples of broader regional political culture. Before joining MSR India in 2005, she lectured for several years at colleges in Delhi and Mumbai and has been part of the editorial team for the journal Economic and Political Weekly. Her current projects focus on understanding middle-class Indian consumption of domestic media, on shared ICT access centers such as Internet cafes and rural PC kiosks, and ICT adoption in slums.

Kentaro Toyama is cofounder and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, where he supports the lab’s daily operation and contributes to strategy and overall management. He also leads the Technology for

Emerging Markets group, which conducts multidisciplinary research to identify applications of computing and electronic technology for socioeconomic development. In 2006 he cofounded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development as a global platform for rigorous scholarship in this area. Prior to his work in India, Toyama did research in computer vision, multimedia, and digital graphics in Redmond and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana. Toyama graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard.

Bonnie Nardi is a professor in the department of informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her interests include activity theory, interaction design, and social life on the Internet. She graduated with a Ph.D. in anthropology from

UC Irvine and a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. She is the author of many scientific articles and books, and is the coauthor (with Victor Kaptelinin) of Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2006). Her new book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, will be published by the University of Michigan Press next year.

November + December 2009

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Ed Cutrell, David Hutchful, and Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan for their input. Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development inspired the title.