Computer center in a native tribe, Tocantins, Brazil.

Figure 2. Boy in a
public school in the
periphery of São
Paulo, Brazil.

For better or worse, at that point C. K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits [ 1], was atop the desks of most managers of large multinational corporations. These companies were rushing to figure out how to tap these untapped markets. On the one hand, it had a rather positive effect in that investments were flowing to a selected group of these countries. They became visible to the market and to businesses. Even I, hired in the U.S. to work as a researcher in Brazil, was evidence of this. Our first challenge, though, was not a design question but a business one. We had to demonstrate that we were addressing a market rather than doing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) job. At that time, the business was trying to get a handle on the emerging markets and was still conflating questions of development and market opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong. CSR is
critical and plays an important
role helping low-income commu-
nities overcome major inequal-
ity. Also, development is still an
issue in various countries (e.g., in
Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia,
and part of South America); conse-
quently, there remains the need for
new understandings and (design)
approaches to address various local
development issues, such as those
being proposed by the ICT4D and
HCI4D communities. However, the
emerging markets were clearly
about creating new business
opportunities by means of a better
understanding of their needs and
wants—at least, that was the idea.

How could I design for local needs as well as meet the global-scale business requirement? Somehow this dilemma was resolved in part by gaining a true understanding of the emerging markets. Let me try to illustrate that with a few concrete examples.

Soon after my return, I visited a native tribe in the middle of Brazil, nowhere near any major urban center. Interestingly, I ran into the most proficient and expert users of the Internet at that time. When a large Brazilian bank foundation brought the Internet to its rural school on the other side of the river, little did they suspect that their neighbors would eventually turn the Internet into an instrument for connecting, sharing, and profiting. The natives quickly realized they could use the Internet to connect with other tribes, request funds, and advocate for their rights. In contrast to local farmers (large and small), they understood that the Internet was clearly a means with which they could perform dialectically their “nativeness” and modernity (see Figure 1).

March + April 2013