This forum looks at how the fields of interaction design and HCI can
extend to cover “developing” communities around the world, ones that
are gaining access to digital technology for the first time.
Gary Marsden, Editor
Developing Our
World Views
Jennifer Pearson
Swansea University | j.pearson@swansea.ac.uk
Simon Robinson
Swansea University | s.n.w.robinson@swansea.ac.uk
In the past few years, there has
been a surge of research focused
around the so-called developing
world. Much of this work is currently conducted by researchers trained
in the West, moving from more
privileged environments to a completely new place, in an entirely different context—commonly known
as research in the wild. It’s easy,
when undergoing such a shift, and
despite having read much of the literature, to have many preconceived
notions about the type of environment you’re going to encounter in
this new situation.
Our work has recently followed
this same path. As early-career
researchers, we have been part of
several large projects, and although
they have differed significantly in
their focus, each, in our view, has
tended to follow the same pattern.
That is, the overarching aim is to
find a gap in existing knowledge;
design novel, useful technology to
fit the context; evaluate via user
studies; and then publish.
A year ago we started work-
ing on a project called Scaling the
Rural Enterprise (StRE), a U.K.-India
collaboration focusing on design-
ing technology and policy devel-
opments to help people in rural
areas (in both the U.K. and India)
scale up their businesses [ 1]. Our
particular focus is mobile inter-
action design, and we have been
developing various technologies
in collaboration with researchers
on the Indian side of the project,
over several extended visits.
Challenges
There are many obvious challenges
for researchers in a new environment, particularly if this involves
working in an unfamiliar, underdeveloped part of the world. As we
are well aware, many of the issues
surrounding research in developing contexts have been widely discussed previously (e.g., [ 2, 3, 4]). The
most prominent examples in our
experience are that we rarely share
a common language with local
