Not Your Average Farmer:
Designing for Lead Users in
ICT4D Research
Neil Patel

Stanford University| [e-mail]
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September + October 2010

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interactions
[ 5] Patel, N.,
Chittamuru, D., Jain, A.,
Dave, P., and Parikh, T.
S. “Avaaj Otalo: A Field
Study of an Interactive
Voice Forum for Small
Farmers in Rural India.”
In Proceedings of ACM
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733–742.

Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) research has a history of making mistakes that, in hindsight, seem obvious. For example, many working in the field have a favorite story of a project gone wrong because of techno-centrism. Mine is the LINCOS telecenter project, intended to provide computing and internet access to a Costa Rican village via a high-tech shipping container, which was described as “an alien spaceship dropping from the sky” [ 1]. It closed after two years—the community began using a new cyber cafe, and the container was vandalized.

This and other early ICT4D projects conflated the goal of diffusing technology with meeting the real needs of a community. Richard Heeks called this “ICT4D 1.0” [ 2]. Fortunately, we are now moving into Heeks’s ICT4D 2.0: Most of the ICT4D papers at CHI 2010 deeply integrated needs-find-ing and community involvement into the design and development of the technology intervention.

But with this step forward come new pitfalls
of which ICT4D researchers should be mindful.
Before designers may have made the mistake of
designing without a deep understanding of the
community and its needs; now that real needs
are being addressed, a potential trap is think-
ing the identified needs are shared by everyone.
There are a few signs this is starting to happen.
First, when describing whose needs are being
addressed, ICT4D research (mine included) rarely
gets more specific than “farmers,” “community
health workers,” “slum dwellers,” or even “low-
literacy users.”
Second, as others have noted, ICT4D research
is often premature in presuming a local solu-
tion is generalizable and can, or should be,
scaled up [ 3]. This is partly driven by tech-
nologists’ bias toward a large-scale perspective,
but it’s also driven by external expectations.
Caught up in a drive to develop scalable solu-
tions, designers tend to be imprecise about who
specific solutions will work for. It is probable
that novel technology interventions in par-
ticular will see significant uptake with only a
subsegment of the larger potential user com-
munity. My view is that rather than feeling
disappointed about this, we should embrace it!