HCC: Information Access, Field Innovation, and Mobile Telephony/Computing in Developing Countries

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Most digital divide research assumes that the fundamental infrastructure of the information society is an internet accessed through personal computers. This was a reasonable assumption for research on the impact of the internet on the social lives of the first billion users, most of who live in rich countries, but today there are more mobile phones in the world than personal computers. These will be the primary informational portal for the next billion internet users. Regardless of the devices' original design specifications, users in developing countries are rapidly adapting the hardware, software and overall functionalities of mobile phones. For example, in Tanzania mobile phones function as ATMs for a community bank, monitors illegal logging, and data collection points for arsenic detection in water wells. This process of evolution is widespread and accompanied by restructuring in local economic, political and cultural organizations. Yet little is known little of these users' design priorities, the infrastructural limits, the social process of organizing field innovations, the consequences of these technical adaptations on information access, and the overall impact on the quality of life and economic prosperity in the developing world. This project will analyze rigorous social science data gathered at sites of technical repurposing and innovation. This study has three inter-related components: (I) an "industrial ethnography," collecting qualitative evidence through a multi-sited study of innovation in IT field labs in Tanzania, focusing on workaround to overcome infrastructural limitations and applications of IT in unexpected organizational contexts; (II) the development of new methodological approach to the digital divide, relying upon quantitative evidence that produces better benchmarks of information access within countries; (III) an integration of education and research activities through an undergraduate research class and publication of an annual World Information Access Report that identifies government policies to help transport innovative ideas between countries. The project will advance understanding of evolving socio-technical systems, identify IT policy "best practices", and involve undergraduate students in original research. It will advance telecommunications policy research by investigating the important causal relationships between telecommunications policy, field innovation, and information inequality in developing countries. It will advance computer engineering by investigating the ways in which IT is being adopted and adapted by the next large user group. It will advance knowledge of human-software-device interaction in a lived context, and contribute to the fields of communication, usability, information systems, and telecommunications policy. Broader Impact This project will improve our understanding of the digital divide, of how to use telecommunications policy and IT innovation to promote social development, and of how the arrival of new human-computer interaction systems becomes an occasion for organizational restructuring in the context of developing countries. Students will be engaged with a new immersive research course and results will be widely disseminated to academics, private industry, and policy makers. Discovering how devices are used in the tough, chaotic conditions of a developing country will benefit us with design concepts for new mobile telephony/computing technologies useful in complex humanitarian disasters, whether at home or abroad. This award is co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering.