User Centered Design and International Development: Participant Support held on April 28, 2007 in San Jose, CA

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

What does the desktop metaphor mean for communities that do not use or value desks? How does the QWERTY keyboard perform in communities whose language has no "Q", "W", "E", "R", "T", nor "Y"? What is the point of a personal computer in a context where technologies are not held for a person but are shared by a whole community? Computer applications and PC appliances have traditionally been designed by and for Western high-income populations. But today the Internet and internet-enabled computers have become a truly global phenomenon reaching out to many of the most remote and marginalized communities. The User Centered Design and International Development workshop that the PI is organizing will be held on Saturday, April 28, in cooperation with the ACM 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 07) in San Jose. This is an official workshop of the CHI 07 conference. The workshop will explore interaction design in the context of international development, and in particular will address interaction design for parts of the world that are often marginalized by current systems and applications designers. The PI believes that to extend the boundaries of existing practice in designing information and communication technologies, their design should be with, for, and of the marginalized communities he plans to set centre stage in the workshop discussions. The workshop will provide a forum to exchange experiences, explore differences between developed and developing world contexts, develop new partnerships, and learn from each other's experiences. NSF funding will enable approximately ten international participants to attend from low-income countries, from which participation would otherwise be impossible. The annual CHI conference, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), is a leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice. It is attended by approximately 2,400 HCI professionals from around the world. Research papers presented at the conference are heavily-refereed and widely cited; they constitute some of the most scientifically respected research publications in the field of HCI. Broader Impacts: A review of the HCI literature exposes the broad intellectual gap that exists between problems of computer interaction and studies of the development impact of computer technologies in low-income countries. By assembling together many of the world leaders in these two disciplines for the first time, the PI expects that this workshop will be instrumental in creating an epistemic community and developing intellectual momentum around these topic areas (the PI reports that he has already have been overwhelmed with over 60 submissions from around the world). Outcomes from the workshop will be reported in the journal Information Technology and International Development; additionally, the PI expects to publish a workshop summary in a leading HCI journal such as Interactions, and possibly also to hold a follow-on workshop at the CHI 08 conference.