definite geopolitical boundary that
separates emerging from developed
from whatever is no longer a useful and valuable lens to capture
the complex ways people shape
and are shaped by consumption,
needs, global cultural practices, and
technologies. Back to my original
point, what is critical is not just an
understanding of local settings and
practices to inform the design of
particular technologies, but rather
a broader analysis of the contexts
in which modernity unfolds. That
is, for me, everyday life becomes a
site of local and global negotiations,
struggles, and cultural productions.
I believe this lies at the heart of
any design effort—a dialectic relationship between “traditions and
transcendences,” as Pelle Ehn put it
[ 3]. As design researchers and practitioners, we will always struggle to
understand and have an effect, be
it through new, accessible technologies, artistic interventions, or other
means. The emerging markets are
not there to be discovered—they are
striving, changing, emerging, consuming, and so on. I thus invite you
to shift your designerly gaze toward
gaining an understanding of and
appreciation for the local in conjunction with the global, the traditional with the modern, so as to let
people live their lives as they want.
They are truly hybrid, after all.
Let us then explore the world of
the “emerged” markets.
March + April 2013
interactions
A few months later, during a
school visit in the periphery of São
Paulo (here, periphery refers to
low-income neighborhoods on the
edges of a city), I stopped a group of
students and asked if I could photograph them. Back in the office, while
going through the photos, one in particular caught my attention. There
was something particularly out of
place in how this boy portrayed
himself (see Figure 2). On the one
hand, he represented a typical kid
from a low-income neighborhood in
Brazil. On the other, by simply crossing his arms in the way he did, he
revealed influences from elsewhere
that increasingly surface in various
groups across socioeconomic classes
worldwide. Crossing his arms like a
New York rapper (or a Brazilian rapper, for that matter), whose music he
very likely listens to, he unwittingly
bridges the local and the global, traveling from the south to the north,
placing himself in this “imaged”
group (or tribe). The gesture embod-ies this strange confluence of local
realities (their affirmation and
denial) and global structures (e.g.,
the global media industry, the global
market, and the like). Oddly, this
arm crossing represents both a political statement (“I am of this kind…”
i.e., black, from a poor neighborhood)
and a consumer statement (“I like
this kind…” i.e., U.S. hip-hop music).
These two simple examples, while
showing this interesting interplay
between local and global, bring us to
my final point, namely, that as these
groups emerge, they will not neces-
sarily be like us. I was raised in a
typical middle-class bourgeois fam-
ily whose values and practices great-
ly resembled those of European and
North American middle-class fami-
lies. For the most part, they emerged
in the aftermath of World War II
as professional workers during the
industrial boom. We can witness
the same thing happening in China
and India today. In contrast, the
emerging middle class in Brazil—a
second wave, I would argue—has
little in common with the first wave.
Of course, this is a complex argu-
ment to make and I cannot fully
defend it here. But it suffices for
the moment to say that while they
are unquestionably consumers,
their references to quality, values,
needs, and the like are different
from “ours.” As a simple example,
Brazilians (like people everywhere)
are consuming tablets. The tradi-
tional middle class is buying the
iPad by and large for the status
conferred by its brand. The emerg-
ing middle class is also consuming
tablets, but for somewhat different
reasons. It is true that they want to
be “included” (i.e., be part of popular
global trends) but they are not nec-
essarily doing so for class distinc-
tion. They see a very practical value
in these tablets: They come with
DTV access so workers can watch
TV during their long commutes.
ENDNOTES:
1. Prahalad, C.K. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid:
Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Pearson Education
Inc., Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004.
2. Nafus, D. and Anderson, K. The real problem: Rhetorics of knowing in corporate ethnographic research. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry
Conference Proceedings. 2006, 244-258.
3. Ehn, P. Work-Oriented Design of Computer
Artifacts. Almquist & Wiksell International,
Stockholm, Sweden, 1998.
DOI: 10.1145/2427076.2427080
© 2013 ACM 1072-5520/13/03 $15.00