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