“The premise of the fortune at the base of the pyramid (BoP) is based on the notion of how to profitably do business with the poor. But few such endeavours have become sustainable businesses, falling prey to bad assumptions, misguided marketing, or poor research.” [...]

“Using the 5D’s—development, design, distribution, demand and dignity—can provide a roadmap for a cohesive, human-centered strategy for well-designed products that sell, services that are successful, and programs with low drop-out rates. Observation and user research conducted to understand your new target audience is critical in establishing the relevant value propositions.”

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This transformation is never complete of course. With a wink to a recent political campaign, it’s also “time for some change” at Interactions Magazine. Five new contributing editors join the magazine, and I am very proud to say that I am one of them. Here are their introductions:

Elaine Ann joins us from Asia. She is the founder of Kaizor Innovation, a strategic innovation consulting company uniquely positioned to help develop appropriate innovation strategies, research, and designs for the emerging Chinese market.

Lauren Serota is a design researcher with Lextant in Columbus, Ohio, where her work incorporates an ever-present passion for cultural diversity and objectivity in the acquisition and analysis of consumer insights for product and service development.

Mark Vanderbeeken is one of four founding partners of the young and dynamic international experience design consultancy Experientia in Italy. Mark is a specialist in visioning, identity development, and strategic communications, as reflected in his wonderful blog, “Putting People First.”

Molly Wright Steenson, forever the “girlwonder,” is an interaction designer and design researcher with roots in Web, mobile, and service design. Molly was an associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Marc Rettig, former chief experience officer at Hanna Hodge, is cofounder of Fit Associates. Marc’s 20-plus-year career has been guided by an interest in people, systems, communication, and the power of design. Marc served as features editor for interactions during the mid-’90s.

The March-April issue will feature my first contribution as contributing editor, followed by a number of guest pieces in the issues after that.

Although most content is not freely available, you can subscribe to the magazine for 55 USD (less than 40 euro). A bargain.

Meanwhile check out the excellent cover story, which is fully online: The washing machine that ate my sari - mistakes in cross-cultural design.

If you missed the presentations, or if you’d like to hear them again, you can now access the archived presentations and video.

Presentations: Building Agent Networks & Creating Regulatory Space

Video: Introduction and Sessions 1 & 2 and Session 3 (requires RealPlayer)

Introduction by Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of CGAP

Session 1: Driving mass market customer usage
Moderator: Kabir Kumar (CGAP); Panelists: Brian Richardson (WIZZIT, South Africa), Bold Magvan (XacBank, Mongolia)

Session 2: Buildng a viable, motivated network of agents
Moderator: Mark Pickens (CGAP); Panelists: Nick Hughes (Vodafone Group), Sam Kamiti (Equity Bank, Kenya), Carl Johan Rosenquist (c/o Maldives Monetary Authority)

Session 3: Creating and taking advantage of regulatory space
Moderator: Tim Lyman (CGAP); Panelists: Rizza Maniego-Eala (Globe Telecom, Philippines), Abbas Sikander (Tameer Bank, Pakistan)

Here’s a great write-up of the sessions from Patrick Philippe Meier at Tufts.

The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion will be the first to explore how the world’s poorest people spend, store and save money. The institute will study how these habits are affected by the emerging mobile banking industry, known as “m-banking,” which could make financial services and the security they provide available to millions of poor people for the first time.

It also will fund research in developing countries, host conferences and provide scholarships to those who conduct such research. An archive on the emerging m-banking industry for use by researchers in the U.S. and around the world also is being planned. [...]

UCI anthropologist Bill Maurer will serve as the institute’s founding director. He is widely known for his research on the anthropology of money, finance, law and property.

The institute officially launched Thursday, Sept. 18, at the beginning of the “Everyday Digital Money” workshop, that Putting People First reported on earlier.

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Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives
a CGAP roundtable and webinar

Dec. 11, 2008 | 2:00pm – 5:00pm
World Bank Headquarters, Washington DC | online at http://technology.cgap.org

Join CGAP for a lively discussion on how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better.

By the end of 2008, the UN says there will be four billion mobile phone connections globally. Millions of air-time resellers and retail agents in developing countries make it possible to distribute financial services at far lower cost than through traditional channels.

Yet in many ways, it is still early days for mobile phone banking. Examples of successful large-scale implementations that target poor customers, and deliver products other than payments and transfers are rare. CGAP, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is working to increase the numbers of such successful m-banking projects. CGAP has provided technical advice, market research and funding to the following organizations. The goal is to increase the reach and scale of financial services for poor people worldwide.

Panelists

• Nick Hughes, Vodafone Group
• Rizza Maniego-Eala, Globe Telecom (Philippines)
• Sam Kamiti, Equity Bank (Kenya)
• Ali Abbas Sikander, Tameer Bank (Pakistan)
• Bold (Mongolia)
• Brian Richardson, Wizzit (South Africa)
• Carl Johan Rosenquist, c/o Maldives Monetary Authority (Maldives)

Hear real-world experiences with implementing mobile banking solutions at scale, in multiple markets, with a diverse range of clients.

Update 20 December: videos are now online.

Included are sections on conducting surveys and petitions, mobile fundraising, creating a mobile website, setting up an SMS hub, and more.

(via ShareIdeas)

Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera
Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera’s mobile media unit, describes some trials where mobile phones were used for news gathering in Chad and the Sahara.

Money, mobiles, micro-business
Jonathan Donner, from Microsoft, talks about the transformation that has been brought upon the way small/informal businesses function using mobile devices (specifically mobile phones). He provides an anecdote on one businessman he knows - a baker, whose business flourished due to the use of a mobile phone he acquired. Included in this video are examples of how this technology enhances the efficiency of product/service delivery by informal businesses.

No difference in how Zambian men and women use mobile phones
Here Kutoma Wakunuma discusses whether women how women are using mobile technology including what are the barriers and social implications. Dr Kutoma revealed that there is no difference in how men and women use cellular phones and also no difference in the socio-economic potential of mobile usage. She unveiled that mobiles phones decrease isolation among women in society and provide easy and fast communication, especially as the price of mobile phones is becoming cheaper by the day. She added that cellular phones encourage job creation for women who sell airtime and those who run public phone stations. They help in emergencies and danger and have made a major impact in health information as some people access counselling through mobile phones on an anonymous basis.

Measuring social impact of mobiles
Dr Peter Benjamin, the General Manager at Cell-Life, together with Patricia Mechal, the Millenium Villages Project advisor hosted a workshop at the MobileActive08 conference. The workshop, on Mobile Metrics and Evaluation explored the importance of investigating the social impact of initiatives that introduce mobiles into societies expecting the impact to be an inherently positive one. The workshop also dealt with how such initiatives tend to be ignorant of the negative repercussions such projects may have.

Microsoft launches ‘Midas’
Microsoft representatives Fredrik Winsnes and Ian Puttergill talk on the MIDAS prototype, a mobile survey application for developing contexts.
MIDAS is based on a Microsoft driven research initiative based in India, to develop an SMS application for improving the farmer’s access to timely and critical information.
The MIDAS prototype allows farmers to send an SMS query pertaining to details about the local crop market, and an almost immediate response is sent back with the appropriate details.
The project is about making farming efficient, and increasing availability.

Mobiles and citizen media
David Sasaki and Juliana Rotich discuss the role of Global Voices online and Ushahidi.com in leveraging citizen media during the post-election violence in Kenya.

Banking the unbankables
Jesse Moore of GSMA development fund facilitated a workshop at mobileactive08 which evaluated mbanking and mpayment and the evolution of these services within the market. The social impact these services could have on people who are not banking, how mobile banking and payments would work and the future of this service were topics addressed in the workshop.

Mymsta - a loveLife conception
Trina DasGupta, loveLife Mobile Marketing Specialist shares the process that went into creating mymsta.com. A youth website geared at guiding the youth towards making their move. Mymsta is about mobilising young people towards positive change. Its about giving them a forum to share their views, on everything from relationships to employment.

Gary Marsden, mobile interaction designer
Interview filmed at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, featuring Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town.

Social SMS gets message across
Activists are boosting their social campaigns by piggy backing on “please call me’s”, flashes and beeps.
Please call me’s are free messages that cellphone users send to get friends and loved ones to call them back.
Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) and Robin Miller (Praekelt Foundation) tell how to use please call me’s to maximise social campaigns and call-centre traffic.

Erik Hersman of whiteafrican.com
Interview with Erik Hersman from whiteafrican.com, shot at MobilActive08 in Johannesburg.

Freedomfone’s fresh look at radio
Mobile’s answer to radio is the Freedomfone. Freedomfone gives users access to dial-up information and services over their mobile. Dubbed ‘dial-up radio’, the service will be invaluable in societies where many people own cellphones but draconian governments have restricted access to newspapers and the airwaves.

Save sea-life with your cell
eMobile phones are becoming the latest gadget used for environmental activism. iVeri payment technology has developed a mobile system for the Southern Africa Sustainable Seafood Institute (sassi)where the public can text a query. The system then sends back a prompt short message reply informing the consumer who is about to make a seafood purchase about the sustainability of the sea life product and other health parameters.

Burma’s GenX activists
Digital Democracy 2.0’s Emily Jacobs and Marc Belinsky show how Burmese (Myanmar) youth use cellphones to communicate with the outside world on political issues that are suppressed by the government.

Mobile’s ‘Dark Side’
“What are the real risks of mobile surveillance?” Al Alegre, executive director of the Foundation for media alternatives has conducted research in 5 Asian countries to investigate the dark side and vulnerabilities in digital interactions and discovered there are threats both internal and external.

Mobile use in low income areas
The use of mobiles in South Africa has increased over the years in low income areas. Tino Kreutzer a masters student at UCT conducted a pilot study into how the youth in low income areas are using mobiles, what this data means and where can researchers go now that they have this data available.

Mobile phones in rural development and agriculture
Ugo Vallauri, David Newman and Jonathan Campaigne discuss small farm productivity issues which are key to economic growth and poverty reduction. They discuss how farmers are not effectively linked to the larger industry and therefore how mobiles phones can be used to help with this area. Farmers use these phones which allow people to enter markets and improve access to partners thereby improving their likelihoods and food security.

Here is the full list of videos

IDE, one of the NGO’s supported by Gates, collaborated closely with the team and co-developed the toolkit and tested it in the field.

The toolkit can be downloaded here and while it would need to be adapted for use in other categories it may be a useful starting point for others who are working on design problems for the poor and under served.

(via Tim Brown)

Dr Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist and ethnographer with both an academic and industry background. Her research has provided considerable insight to the importance of culture in the adoption and adaptation of technology. She is currently the Director of User Experience in Intel Corporation’s Digital Home Group in the United States.

Listen to lecture (mp3, 48 min, 16.5 mb)

The discussion started from the premise that our understanding of the effects of online media on society “are largely based on research in open societies, especially in the U.S. But there’s lots less work on the effects of new media in other parts of the world, especially in closed societies, and much of the work that’s done is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate.”

Aside from Zuckerman himself, panels included John Kelly, founder of Morningside Analytics, who talked about the emerging networked public sphere and presented his maps of online social networks in Iran, Egypt, Russia, and China; Evgeny Morozov, who is writing a book on the Internet in authoritarian countries; and Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian-American writer who discussed how the Iranian diaspora uses the Internet..

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(via Worldchanging)

The project, which is funded by the Danish Network for Research Based Userdriven Innovation - NfBI, will be exploring how to create new products and business models to improve the life of the half of the world’s population that is getting by on less than 4 USD a day (in comparative purchasing power as if they were living in the US), and how to put people first and include their needs and aspirations, and their knowledge and resources in this [which the UN calls Growing Inclusive Markets].

Aside from the forementioned Center, other entities involved are SPIRE - Research Center for Participatory Innovation at University of Southern Denmark, and the Danish company Danisco, that provides bio-based solutions for food ingredients and other stuff and is exploring how it can develop products and business models that will improve the nutrition and income of people in the rural areas of India.

According to a blog post by Louise Koch of the Center for Sustainable Innovation, the research project aims are:

1. To map the existing field of knowledge and methods for people centred innovation with BoP
2. To identify the key challenges and opportunities for companies in identifying and incorporating peoples needs and aspirations in innovation with BoP
3. To sketch a methodology for a people centred approach for innovation with Base of the Pyramid.

The first programme (alternate site) introduces the essential nature of the mobile phone in Africa.

The high cost of using a mobile phone in Africa is the focus of second programme (alternate site). Africans spend between 6 to 10% of their monthly income on mobile phone use. What do they do to afford this?

The last programme (alternate site) looks at Africa as a highly innovative environment for mobile phone use, with many mobile services — banking, micro-finance, market information, political activism, journalism — that are still marginal in more developed economies.

The series was produced in collaboration with Atelier des Médias, RFI’s participative web community.

(via kiwanja.net)

“Africans are not the passive recipients of technology many people seem to think they are. Indeed, some of the more exciting and innovative mobile services around today have emerged as a result of ingenious indigenous use of the technology. Services such as “Call Me” — where customers on many African networks can send a fixed number of free messages per day when they’re out of credit requesting someone to call them — came about as a result of people “flashing” or “beeping” their friends (in other words, calling their phones and hanging up to indicate that they wanted to talk). [...]

The concept of mobile payments did, too.”

He concludes that also when dealing with indigenous societies, ICT solutions should “seek to build on existing procedures and traditions, and not just assume that a new, modern solution is better and replace everything that went before”.

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KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have disappeared, blended, or mutated into unexpected forms. Understand the near future, and help shape it!

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s conventional financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless — or maybe it’s the systems themselves that have gone astray. Yet you still have your laptop, the Internet, and a broadband mobile connection. What would you do to create a new informal economy that would help you get by? What would you live on? E-barter? Rationing? Gadgets? Google juice? Cellphone minutes? Imagine a whole world approaching that condition. Which of today’s major power-players would win and lose, thrive or fail? What strange new roles would tomorrow’s technology fill?

Besides Bruce Sterling, the initial collaborators are Régine Debatty (of we-make-money-not-art), Nicolas Nova (LIFT) and Joshua Klein (author and hacker), who have been collaborating on initiating the discussion.

KashKlash is now opening up to you. You can join and follow the debate of our experts or contribute yourself by leaving a comment on the different matters or fill out our KashKlash questionnaire.

This public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy.

Check the project description for more info.

From the press release:
“Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.”

Ken Banks, creator of FrontlineSMS, granted it a long article on PC World (copied on his blog) is enthusiastic:

“What’s particularly interesting from a technical standpoint is Nokia’s snub of GPRS in favor of SMS. With data connectivity still patchy at the best of times, and confusion surrounding configuration and price plans, text messaging once again demonstrates its ability to remain relevant.

So, what next? Nokia develops a mobile payment platform and embeds the client into all of its emerging market handsets? Imagine: A single company controlling the entire mobile technology value chain would make interesting viewing. It could well be the answer to the age old fragmentation problems suffered by the “social mobile” and ICT4D space, but would this give the Finnish giant Google-esque powers?

These are interesting times. And, for once, it’s the users at the bottom of the pyramid who stand to gain the most.”

Clinton Jeff from DarlaMack.com, also posted a big write-up.

No video or presentation download is as yet available, but several bloggers have it summarised.

Robert Fabricant of frog design focuses on his personal favourites and is an especially interesting read. Christine Huang of PSFK found especially interesting the principles that guide him and his team members when they’re conducting research in the field. Drew Cogbill wrote a more general summary.

Required reading for those doing research in emerging markets.

User Experience is the quarterly magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association (membership is a modest 100 USD) and its latest issue is devoted to usability in transportation. Here are the titles of the feature articles and you can find the abstracts online:

Taxi: Service Design for New York’s yellow cabs
By Rachel Abrams

Safer Skies: Usability at the Federal Aviation Administration
By Ferne Friedman-Berg, Ph.D, Kenneth Allendoerfer, Carolina Zingale, Ph.D, Todd Truitt, Ph.D.

Listen Up: Do voice recognition systems help drivers focus on the road?
By David G. Kidd, M. A., David M. Cades, M. A., Don J. Horvath, M. A., Stephen M. Jones, M. A., Matthew J. Pitone, M. A., Christopher A. Monk, Ph. D.

Get Your Bearings: User perspective in map design
By Thomase Porathe

Lost in Space: Holistic wayfinding design in public spaces
By Dr. Christopher Kueh

A Really Smart Card: How Hong Kong’s Octopus Card moves people
By Daniel Szuc

Recommendations on Recommendations: Making usability usable
By Rolf Molich, Kasper Hornbæk, Steve Krug, Josephine Scott and Jeff Johnson

Disclosure: my business partner Michele Visciola is on the editorial board of this magazine.

Interactions is the bimonthly publication of ACM. Better designed than User Experience, it has become, under the thoughtful leadership of Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko, both profound in its analysis and broad in its interests. At 55 USD for six issues, it is also a bargain.

Here is the latest harvest of articles, some of which you can actually find online:

Designing Games: Why and How
Sus Lundgren

An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research
Liz Sanders

Signifiers, Not Affordances
Don Norman

User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing
Mike Kuniavsky

Cultural Theory and Design: Identifying Trends by Looking at the Action in the Periphery
Christine Satchell

Understanding Children’s Interactions: Evaluating Children’s Interactive Products
Janet C. Read, Panos Markopoulos

An Exciting Interface Foray into Early Digital Music: The Kurzweil 250
Richard W. Pew

Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
Steve Portigal

Design: A Better Path to Innovation
Nathan Shedroff

A Call for Pro-Environmental Conspicuous Consumption in the Online World
Bill Tomlinson

Of Candied Herbs and Happy Babies: Seeking and Searching on Your Own Terms
Elizabeth Churchill

Experiencing the International Children’s Digital Library
Benjamin B. Bederson

Taken For Granted: The Infusion of the Mobile Phone in Society
Rich Ling

How Society was Forever Changed: A Review of The Mobile Connection
Brian Romanko

Audiophoto Narratives for Semi-literate Communities
David Frohlich, Matt Jones

Think Before You Link: Controlling Ubiquitous Availability
Karen Renaud, Judith Ramsay, Mario Hair

Disclosure: As of next year, I will be a contributing editor to the magazine (and I feel honoured to be in such esteemed company).

The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural, psychological, legal, artistic, technological, and industrial perspectives, in order to identify key topics for future research within and across disciplines; such as:

• M-banking, m-payment, and electronic remittance systems
• Design tradeoffs; e.g., security/accountability vs. accessibility/empowerment
• Financial literacies and numeracies
• Regulatory conflicts and opportunities
• Formal and informal experimentation with new electronic moneys
• Connections to physical and virtual mobilities

The workshop blog contains a lot of materials, including the presentation abstracts of each of the sessions:

• Opening keynote: Money in the Digital Revolution by Professor Keith Hart (Goldsmith’s College and author of the book “The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World” - make sure to check out his very rich informational blog)
• Session 1: Alternative monies - contributors: Hugo Godschalk (PaySys Consultancy), Peter Etherden (CESC.net), and Michael Linton (Open Money)
• Session 2: Credit and debit cards - contributors: Hélène Ducourant (University of Lille I), Timothy de Waal Malefyt (BBDO & Parsons, The New School for Design), and Allison Truitt (Tulane University)
• Session 3: Innovation design and adoption - contributors: Jan Ondrus (ESSEC Business School), Tapan S. Parikh, Jenna Burrell, and Coye Cheshire (UC Berkeley), and Kazi Huque and Narayan Sundararajan (Grameen-Intel)
• Panel discussion with Julia Elyachar (Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine), Amolo Ng’weno (Senior Program Officer, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and Paul Thomas (Chief Economist, Intel)
• Session 4: Online money - contributors: Prashant Dewan and David Durham (Intel), Subhashini Ganapathy, Delbert Marsh, and Glen J. Anderson (Intel), and Bruce Davis (Freemarket)
• Session 5: Designing new experiences - contributors: Daisy Ginsberg (Royal College of Art) and Wendy March (Intel), and Scott Mainwaring (Intel) and Camellia George (California College of the Arts)
• Session 6: Mobile payments and transfers - contributors: Charles Bassey (Central Bank of Nigeria), Jenna Burrell (UC Berkeley), Olga Morawczynski (University of Edinburgh), and David Pedersen (UC San Diego)
• Closing keynote: Re-examining M-banking: Linking Adoption, Impact, and Use by Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India)

Some papers and presentation slides are available on various websites, including

• Money 2.0 by Michael Linton (Open Money)
• Why mobile payments fail? An analysis of the Swiss case by Jan Ondrus (ESSEC Business School)
• Facilitating richer exchanges using mobile technologies by Tapan S. Parikh, Jenna Burrell, and Coye Cheshire (UC Berkeley)
• Why alternative monies? by Paul Thomas (Chief Economist, Intel)
• Social life of money by Bruce Davis (Freemarket)
• Digital money in a digitally divided world: nature, challenges and prospects of ePayment systems in Africa by Charles Bassey (Central Bank of Nigeria)
• Examining the Adoption and Usage of m-banking: The Case of M-PESA in Kenya by Olga Morawczynski (University of Edinburgh) - related paper
• Re-examining M-banking: Linking Adoption, Impact, and Use by Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) - related paper

Further browsing unearthed additional resources such as:

• Book: Money - Ethnographic encounters edited by Stefan Senders and Allison Truitt
• Exhibition: The Anthropology of Money in Southern California
• Presentation: Getting the Numbers Straight: Mobile Phone Usage Explained, a presentation by Tino Kreutzer on patterns of mobile/mobile internet use among low-income teens in urban Cape Town
• Presentations: Mobile use by micro and small enterprises; Bending ‘the rules of beeping’ for social marketing (miss calls); and M-banking/M-payments for social impact by Jonathan Donner (make sure to check out his excellent blog)
• Project: SeeShell
• Resources: Links and Glossary on Everyday Digital Money blog

According to Nokia’s senior design manager Younghee Jung, they were set up as a community design competition with the theme of ‘design your ideal mobile phone’, hosted in 3 communities of Dharavi (Mumbai, India), Favela Jacarezinho (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Buduburam (Accra, Ghana).

“It’s a method that we have been developing through several projects over years. my pursuit is to find a way to meaningfully engage and understand people in the design research phase when the research topic does not provide coherent anchor points to real-world behaviors. That’s why we call this work exploratory design research: often starting with a guiding theme but not knowing the full extent of what we will learn and discover.”

Or in the words of Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase: “Despite what you might assume for a studio, the most valuable output of the Open Studio is not the designs, but in providing an alternative way for people to articulate their wants and needs - within the context of their community.”

- Presentation (SlideShare | PowerPoint)
- Research paper

“A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India [...] approaches the technology of emerging markets in unconventional ways. These computer scientists say they have the freedom to forget about PCs and software altogether as they tackle problems. Most often, they rely on a mix of sociology and empirical testing to see whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it.”

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