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.”

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“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. .”

“What impressed me most about TEM is its staff members’ multidisciplinary backgrounds. In addition to computer scientists and engineers, TEM also includes experts in the areas of ethnography, sociology, political science, and development economics, all of which help Microsoft understand the social context of technology in emerging markets like India. [...]

By leveraging its multidisciplinary talent, TEM has developed some amazing solutions designed for emerging and underserved markets, both in rural and urban environments.”

Radjou sees this as an example of Microsoft’s new direction in terms of research and development:

“Undoubtedly Microsoft is pioneering the R&D 2.0 model that I discussed in my last post — an organizational model that relies on anthropologists and development economists to first decipher the socio-cultural needs of users in emerging markets like India and then use these deep insights to develop appropriate technology solutions. And it’s telling that Microsoft picked India as the epicentre of its global R&D transformation.”

He concludes with “some operating principles that [he] can offer to senior managers in other multinationals who wish to deploy the R&D 2.0 model in their own emerging market units like India.”

Navi Radjou is the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

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“In the past few years our research into how people communicate, how they capture and share experiences has repeatedly touched on issues around privacy, security and trust.”

Jan then continues in sharing with us “10 relatively modest insights drawn from studies of mainstream users around the world”. They confront us with some broader issues, raise many questions, and are a strongly recommended read.

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“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”.

“For all the current buzz currently surrounding ethnographic / anthropological research – this isn’t the only way to feel out what or how to design (in the broadest sense of the word), doesn’t always provide value, and absolutely shouldn’t be part of every design process – anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t asking enough questions about what their client needs and hasn’t factored in the skills of the team at hand. At its worst ethnographic research is an expensive, time-consuming distraction that can take the design team (and the client they represent) in the wrong direction.

At its best, well, at its best it inspires, informs, and delivers insights that can shape and sustain ideas/products/services/resources through the organisation all the way to the consumer, it’s cost effective, it’s timely, it’s responsive. It’s as much about bridging corporate culture as bridging cultures.”

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We build the parts, you build the product
The creator of Zoybar, an open-source hardware platform that lets anyone invent their own instrument, talks about “decentralized innovation.”

Neil Gershenfeld (MIT) on the future of invention
By digitizing not just the communication of ideas but also the fabrication of things, the campus can now effectively come to the student.

Future of Open Source: Collaborative Culture and Hardware Hacking
Douglas Wok talks on the new open source culture, in which anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media, whereas Ryan Paul discusses what the open source movement will generate now that it is extending its reach to the hardware industry.

The Repair Manifesto
The Dutch art collective Platform21 introduces The Repair Manifesto, which “opposes throwaway culture and celebrates repair as the new recycling.”
(via Design Observer)

Now think what all this could mean in emerging markets:

UN and HP bring technology training to youth in Africa and Middle East
The United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the technology company HP announced today the opening of 20 training centres in Africa and the Middle East to expand youth entrepreneurship and information technology education.

And finally there is the truly unbeatable video Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant, which I posted about a month ago on Core77.

Digital We: A (Multiple) Identity Crisis
We create new digital identities almost without limit – at the same time new technologies urge us to blur them. Is it a new digital arms race?

“Intentionally or not, the world of bits offers so many opportunities to create information related to ourselves, and for that information to coalesce into something like an identity, that even the most transparent and consistent Net denizens appears in multiple forms in multiple locations. You might say that we’re all suffering from a form of digital schizophrenia.

Yet according to a number of our ideators, the ways in which we coordinate our digital personae is about to change.”

Global Vision, Local Impact
Technology innovations in the developing world generate lasting results

“The developing world has begun to experience a dramatic transformation not only in the adoption of new technologies but in the innovative ways they are being used. Mobile devices in particular have offered unprecedented opportunities to individuals without access many other basic amenities.”

Also on Ideas Project a video interview with Ann Winblad, a well-known and respected software industry entrepreneur and technology leader, who argues that by moving technology from location-based servers to a virtual environment, with expanded if not universal access, the opportunities for innovation increase exponentially.

“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.”

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But Robert Fabricant went a step further:

“In 10 years, the phone won’t matter at all. We will have moved from a phone-based network to an account based network in which I can access all of my communications data from the cloud–from any phone or device that is convenient. The tight coupling of my information to specific piece of hardware will be eliminated, just like email has nothing to do with my PC anymore. This is not just the future for those of us in developed markets with access to corporate IT support and MobileMe. This is the future for the masses. There is a desperate need for broad-based access in developing markets that doesn’t require the ownership of a dedicated personal device. Services will allow someone to access their contacts, messaging and credit from any device, whether the phone belongs to their uncle or is a community phone. People will have multiple accounts. Employers will enable accounts as will local health workers so that people can access sensitive information related to HIV or TB without having to compromise the confidentiality of this information on a shared device. This revolution is starting right now with companies like MoVirtu.”

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“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

“[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.”

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Taken your medicine?
Health care: Mobile phones provide a cheap and simple way to ensure that patients have popped their pills.
Very nice and simple service design project in emerging markets

Mapping a better world
Software: Interest groups around the world are using mapping tools and internet-based information sources to campaign for change.
Great article on how mapping technologies are creating real social change

The connected car
Cars are becoming more connected, both to remote systems for navigation and information, and to each other.
The internet of things, in and around your car

Sensors and sensitivity
Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
What would be the advantages of turning the world’s 4 billion mobile phones into sensors on a global data-collection network?

You can download a PDF of the entire supplement, courtesy of SAP.

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.)

“A few years ago, some people were worrying that a “digital divide” would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.”

The photos are great, and so are some of the quotes:

“When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.”

But it also shows to what extent the internet in the developed world is still a computer-based phenomenon, in contrast to emerging markets where it is largely mobile.

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“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.”

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The impact is to be felt most in developing world where access to banking is limited.

“Mobile payments, when used in developed countries such as the U.S., are usually an extension of an existing payment infrastructure, but in developing countries, users can combine mobile payments with mobile banking to pay bills more conveniently and to gain access to loans and other financial services that might not have been possible before, said Sandy Shen, a Gartner analyst. “It can greatly improve standards of living,” she said.”

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