The article, which also describes two emerging design practices (catalyst design and performance design), is a highly recommended read.

A few quotes:

“We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences? What, ultimately, is the role of the designer in sorting through these desires to determine which should drive our design decisions? And what frameworks, other than intuition, should we use to make these judgments?”

“What we are beginning to appreciate is the degree to which user behavior is ALWAYS subject to influence. We should not assume that our role is to somehow remove those influences so that the user can act in a free and unconstrained manner to achieve their own needs, as that is impossible. The user is not a self-contained actor in the system, but one who is largely and continually open to influences, the most important of which he/she is generally not conscious of. Our design decisions are just one influence among many, not categorically different, and often not the most effective in motivating the user to achieve their desired aims.”

Read full story

“This will, be definition, limit access of such services to the poorest individuals in the country who are least likely to afford an SMS almost eight times the cost of the cheapest SMS in country. Which means that Grameen Foundation’s headline for it’s press release “GF, Google and MTN Uganda Launch New Mobile Services for Uganda’s Poor” might just be a bit misleading.”

But Erik Hersman, who reflects on the same issue on his blog White African, doesn’t agree:

“The question posed is if people who are claiming to help the poor should charge, and if so, should they make a profit?

I think we’ve seen from the Grameen model in Bangladesh (ex: Grameen Bank and Grameen Phone’s Village Phone program) that you can (and possibly should). By doing so you help both parties; first, by providing a service that consumers value and are willing to pay for, and second by making the business of running an operation self-sustaining. Many good business, or project, ideas die due to lack of sustainable cash flow. .”

“Marrying” anthropology and science

“I still write and publish my work in academic journals. To me, what we do in companies like Intel is the cutting edge of anthropological study.

“We form a relationship with the consumer and represent their needs. It’s a moral obligation to tell their stories.

“We find out what makes people tick, not just so that we can sell them things, but to make life better for them by ensuring that people in small towns and emerging markets can afford it. We want to help create technology for more people.”

Annoying things device-users do

“The top responses for strange mobile etiquette behaviour ranged from making a cashier wait until a cellphone call was completed and texting while driving.

Other responses included using a laptop in a public toilet, as well as hearing typing and conversations at church, during a funeral, and in a doctor’s office.”

Better television

“My engineering colleagues were desperately convinced that everything was a PC waiting to happen.

“What is needed is to meaningfully blend television and the Internet. My research conclusion was clear – consumers love television and only put up with their PCs because they want to connect to the Internet.

“It’s clear that people care about social networking and its technologies so how to we bring that into TV sets?

“Imagine accessing Flicker or Twitter on your television without turning it into a PC ? We desire for television to do more but it must not be too complicated. The challenge is to create technology that can accommodate local content,” she says, noting that there is a huge space for advancement in consumer electronics, especially to “make television better”.

“Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful pilot program in India, a company executive said Monday.

Nokia is now formulating plans to roll out Life Tools, which includes agricultural and educational services for rural mobile users, in other emerging markets following the “great success” of a trial conducted in India, said Mary McDowell, executive vice president and chief development officer at Nokia, speaking at a company event in Singapore ahead of the CommunicAsia conference and exhibition, which opens on June 16.”

Read full story

This brochure, published by GTZ, provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the theme and discusses both the potentials and the possible limits to the participatory web.

- Read press release
- Download brochure (44 pages)

“To effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer base in emerging markets, I believe multi-national companies [MNCs] must adopt a new global innovation model. Let’s call it global R&D 2.0.

This global R&D 2.0 strategy calls for a talent recalibration in MNCs’ R&D labs in emerging markets. I suggest that multinationals, besides employing technically-oriented engineers and scientists, begin to staff their R&D units in developing nations like India with two other types of experts, namely:

Anthropologists and ethnographers. By having anthropologists study and interact with end-customers in their natural settings, Western firms can learn to tailor their business models and offerings to match users’ socio-economic and cultural context. [...]

Development economists. [...] To effectively lure low-income buyers into procuring their low-end goods and services, multinationals need the help of development economists who can concoct creative pricing and financing mechanisms, such as microcredit schemes.”

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“In this program we’ll highlight several interesting initiatives, one in Africa and one in the South Asia region, initiatives which have had success largely because of their responsiveness to people needs. And we’ll also question the West’s preconceptions about the future technological needs of the world’s poor.”

The programme features Nathan Eagle, a research scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, whose “area of expertise is exploring ways in which the lives of people in the developing world can be enhanced by creatively using a simple piece of everyday technology, the mobile phone”; Jerry Watkins, a senior lecturer in design at Swinburne University in Melbourne, who is the co-principal investigator of the ‘Moving Content’ project in India; and Archie Law, CEO of ActionAid Australia, which is “in the process of setting up what they call a ‘blog outreach post’ where the idea is “to send someone to a remote part of the developing world, in this case Tanzania, and have them establish a communications point there.”

Listen to audio or view transcript

Here are the feature articles (of which the last one, which is excellently written and directly dealing with the current state of user experience, is my top recommendation):

Education: Business is increasingly plugging the skills gaps of the world’s workforce
by Sarah Richardson and Paul Tyrrell
With skills shortages affecting both developed and developing countries, business is increasingly stepping in to help educate the workers of tomorrow – feature includes examples from the Fashion Retail Academy (UK), BP Angola, Intel Corporation. and more.

Small sums, big benefits: microfinance brings banking to untapped markets
by Sarah Murray
Across Africa, Barclays is giving fledgling entrepreneurs access to modern financial services for the first time.

Simplicity: new designs focus on making complex products easy to use
by Rob Tannen
Leading companies are realising that they need to refocus on what consumers actually want and need, rather than stuffing more into products and services than their rivals.

View and download magazine

Watch video

(via CGAP)

“[The conference] frequently explored and critiqued the thesis of CK Prahalad in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, which argues that aiming corporatized products at those living at the very bottom of the social ladder will enable markets to alleviate poverty while giving do-gooders a respectable profit by aiming for a kind of long tail that aggregates small sums and micropayments and often uses mobile phones and other kinds of ubiquitous computing technologies to foster exchange.”

Read full story

“One of the issues that keeps cropping up when discussing mBanking (and branchless banking) is the challenge of agent reliability and customer service. How does one ensure the trustworthiness of a growing network of agents and simultaneously handle customer complaints?

A number of speakers at Fletcher’s recent conference highlighted these challenges and warned they would become more pressing with time. So this got me thinking about an Ushahidi-for-mBanking platform.

Since mBanking customers by definition own a mobile phone, a service like M-Pesa or Zap could provide customers with a dedicated short code which they could use to text in concerns or report complaints along with location information. These messages could then be mapped in quasi real-time on an Ushahidi platform. This would provide companies like Safaricom and Zain with a crowdsourced approach to monitoring their growing agent network.”

Read full story

(See also this Reuters story)

My preferred pieces:

Skills: Business must learn from the new tribe
So-called ‘digital natives’ are bringing down the barriers to collaborative working, finds Jessica Twentyman
(If you read one article only, this is the one.)

Mobility: Flexibility is driven from the bottom up
But organisations must ensure employees are not slaves to mobile devices, notes Stephen Pritchard

Overcoming the fear of connectivity
Some organisations, fearful of untoward consequences such as reputational damage, ban social networking websites. Others embrace them enthusiastically and try to persuade others to do likewise.

Developing world: ‘Have-nots’ no closer to catching the ‘haves
Cellphones are nearly ubiquitous but internet access is still very patchy, says Paul Taylor

Case study: Text messages give shopkeepers the power to bulk buy
Stroll through South Africa’s villages – as steeped in ancestral tradition as they are deprived of basic services – and you will come across the convenience store, writes Tom Burgis.

Opinion: IT makes poverty a ‘curable affliction’
Olav Kjorven of the UNDP argues that innovative programmes in developing nations have helped people increase their choices and opportunities

Donor programmes: Sponsors can now view benefits online
Non-governmental organisations and government bodies can see exactly how their money is being spent, writes Danny Bradbury

Developed world: Those with no access miss out on opportunities
Jessica Twentyman examines the evidence that digital exclusion and social disadvantage go hand in hand

Connecting the world: Ubiquity will be a hard state to reach
Network access for all requires money but there are also significant technical hurdles, writes Stephen Pritchard

(Note that without subscription you can read only 10 FT articles a month. But you can double or triple that by installing more than one browser.)

“Adrian Simpson discovers the future of TV entertainment in Belgium; how the mobile phone camera revolutionizes healthcare in Kenya; the way in which government processes are facilitated through internet access in Mexico; and the political influence of SMS and social networking sites during the Obama election campaign in the US. But that’s not all – in the second half of 2009 Adrian will continue to travel to the corners of the globe, to find out how connectivity is impacting people’s lives from Austria to Zimbabwe.”

Currently the site has five 10 minute video episodes up on Europe, Africa, Latin America, USA and India (with China and Jakarta/Tokyo following soon). Each episode comes with clearly marked additional footage, plus interviews of Nokia Siemens Networks customers in those areas.

Mira Slavova of the excellent mmd4d blog that deals with mobile services for emerging markets, reports extensively on the African episode and its additional footage.

“In order to understand what users need and want from their next mobile device, we need to get in the field and ask, as some mobile manufacturers do. Anthropology, with its human-centered approach to research, has become quite a trendy discipline in the mobile world, particularly when it’s done in exotic emerging markets.

The irony of this approach is that, perhaps for the first time, the needs of the consumer in the developing world are beginning to drive innovation and thinking at home. With concerns about global warming, energy dependence and the environment rising up the political agenda, mobile manufacturers find themselves tackling the very same problems as they design for the developing world. These markets by their very nature demand greener, recyclable, longer-lasting, energy-efficient mobile phones. Today technology transfer works both ways, and it’s increasingly heading in our direction.”

Read full story

For example, mobile phones help rural farmers gather information about crop prices, and bargain shoppers download coupons on the fly.

For this NPR Talk of the World program, guests and listeners from around the world discuss innovative ways they use their cellular phone.

Guests are:
- Natasha Elkington, journalist for Reuters. She uses her mobile phone to pay her farm manager in Kenya.
- Amy Webb, principal for Webbmedia Group
- Alieu Conteh, founder of Vodacom, a cell phone company in Congo
- Hiram Enriquez, independent consultant focusing on mobile technologies and digital media strategy

Listen now

The process is based on one driving question: How can government and private sector most affect the uptake and usage of branchless banking among the unserved majority by 2020?

Jonathan Donner is a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India. Previously, Jonathan was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and worked for the consultancies Monitor Company and The OTF Group. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Communication Theory and Research.

Speaking on the side of a workshop that was held in Cape Town last month, Jonathan shared his views on how cash and electronic money aren’t so different when it comes to a question of trust, and how branchless banking is helping poor people spend less time and money to do simple financial transactions.

Listen to interview (mp3)

“Nobody stands to benefit quite like Africa’s increasingly powerful telecom companies, the conglomerates who built this continent’s cellular towers and enable its calls.

“These guys are going to be more powerful than Google, more powerful than Microsoft, within the locality in which they operate,” Amankwah said. “Already, telecoms move more money than the banks. And they have control over the channels — it’s their sim card. You’re using their network.”

Read full story

Talking Mobile Banking in Kenya
Notes from the panel “Perspectives on Mobile and Branchless Financial Service”

Volume vs Value in Mobile Payment Systems
Talk by Stephen Mwaura Nduati, who is in charge of “Payment Systems” at the Central Bank of Kenya

The authors, a group of people around Mimi Ito, believe that examining new media practices from an international (and, in some cases, transnational) perspective will enhance their current efforts to theorise youth, new media and learning, a wider MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

China (by Cara Wallis): introduction – mobile phones – gaming – internet – new media production – conclusion
Korea (by HyeRyoung Ok): introduction – internet – gaming – mobile phones – new media production – conclusion
India (by Anke Schwittay): introduction – mobile phones – gaming – internet – new media production – conclusion
Brazil (by Heather Horst): introduction – internet – new media production – games – mobile phones – conclusion
Japan (by Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe): introduction – internet – mobile phones – new media production – gaming – conclusion
Ghana (by Araba Sey): introduction – mobile phones – internet – new media production – gaming – conclusion

Each case study focuses upon the telecommunications landscape, internet and mobile phone practices, gaming, and new media production, and provides a unique perspective on the ways in which infrastructure, institutions and culture (among other factors) shape contemporary new media practices.

Summaries 1
David Hollow – ICT4D Collective / RHUL
* The $100 laptop in Ethiopia – A case study
Nkeiru Joe – International Law department , Virije Universiteit Brussel
* Staying connected to Africa: an ecosystem approach

Summaries 2
Ken Banks – Kiwanja.net / FrontlineSMS
* Mobiles in Africa – How technology is driving social and economic change
Nigel Waller – Movirtu.com
* How we’re creating access to basic phone services for more than a billion people earning less than two dollars a day
Sian Townsend – Google
* Conducting mobile user experience research in sub-Saharan Africa

Summaries 3
Nick Short – University of London Veterinary College
* How mobile telephony is being used to improve veterinary services in East Africa.
Niall Winters & Kevin Walker – London Knowledge Lab
* Village e-Science for Life: Participatory Design of ICT for Rural Agricultural Villages in Kenya
Alex Petrov – Working Villages International
* Building Peace in Eastern Congo: A Village of Hope
Simon Berry – ColaLife.org
* An amazing story that shows how the convening power of the internet can turn the head of a global brand . . . and get them to act.

Summaries 4
Martin Konzett – ICT4D Austria
* ICT4D and grass roots approaches in Africa
Dave Mason – IntraHealthOPEN
* How downloading a song can open the future of a continent.
Juergen Eichholz
* AfriGadget

Panel Discussion
Juliana Rotich, A J Munn, Erik Hersman,
Erik Hersman – White African, Afrigadget, Ushahidi born in South Africa
Alisdair Munn – tcg The Communication Group, trying to enhance understandning social media tools
Juliana Rotich – Ushahidi, Global Voices Online – Twitter, Mathematics, from Zimbabwe

Check also this excellent video trailer of the ICT4D movie project, which deals with mobile phone use in Zanzibar.