Interactions - March/April 2013

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.