or even using a computer. However, most rural villages in the developing world charge their handsets from 12-volt car batteries, which are more prevalent in that environment than PCs with USB ports. While the switch to micro-USB will improve lives for some handset users, things stay the same for those in the developing world.

So, again, we see that the goals in designing technology are the same across the planet (e.g., convenience in cellular-handset charging), but inherent assumptions by those creating the technology lead to an imperfect compromise for those in the developing world. Of course, there are ongoing efforts by technology companies to conduct ethnography in the developing world (a lot of which has been reported in this column) in order to understand the constraints of different countries and people groups. So, the 4D community should be providing technology designers with sets of constraints to better inform the design process.

the developing world not just to teach interaction design students the methods we all use, but also how to adapt those methods to the developing world. Some researchers, I should add, are already exploring this space: for example, Susan Wyche has been running design classes with students in Kenya. As a computer scientist, I want to teach the students who create technology that words like “efficient” can have different meanings in different contexts. Again, although Java may be Java, perhaps teaching it on a mobile platform may be more appropriate in Africa?

Angst Again?

I think it is fair to say that in the past five years we have seen digital design for the developing world mature to the point where it has created a sense of identity and responsibility, both to the developing world and to the disciplines from which it came. And although we started in angst and have moved to maturity, I hope this column keeps the spirit of angst alive in the field. For me, I do not think we can afford to be complacent about the people or contexts in which we work. I doubt we will ever have reliable methods that will work for every context, but that does not mean we should give up trying. I believe 4D is one of the most exciting areas of interaction design at the moment, and I look forward to reading about more angst for as long as this column exists.

November + December 2010

Column Editors are Not Free from Bias

At this point, I feel a confession is in order. I am a white male computer scientist, educated in the U.K. and then employed by several U.K. universities to teach HCI. Eleven years ago, I moved to South Africa to take a position in the computer science department at the University of Cape Town. Since arriving here I have been trying to understand how, why, if computer science and interaction design are different in the developing world. This has resulted in reflections, such as this column, aimed at people in the developed world, in an effort to help them create better technologies for the developing world. However, I believe this is a limited response.

The issues I have highlighted—unintended biases built into technology and methods— would not have arisen were those methods built by people living in the countries for which the technology is intended. As Papeneck noted in his seminal book Design for the Real World, in order to create appropriate designs for the developing world, we need to educate the people in those countries to create their own designs. My unintended bias was, therefore, to believe that the way to tackle the 4D problem was to enable designers from one country to design for another. Instead, I now propose another branch to 4D research: to figure out how to train educators in

Acknowledgments

Most of the ideas presented here have come from discussions with Edwin Blake, Nic Bidwell, Jonathan Donner, Susan Dray, Richard Harper, and Ed Cuttrell, who have challenged, crushed, and cajoled me to think thoughts I would rather not and challenge ideas that I had held as fundamental.

About the Author Gary Marsden is current-
ly employed as an associate professor in the
department of computer science at the University
of Cape Town in South Africa. He was born in
Ireland, studied in Scotland, and had his first job in
interactions

DOI: 10.1145/1865245.1865260
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/1100 $10.00