“We seek to create a community of practice and inquiry into the everyday uses and meanings of money, as well as examining the technological infrastructures being developed as carriers of mainstream and alternative currencies worldwide.

Money costs money for people who are extremely poor and who have limited or no access to banks or credit. For many of the world’s poor, fees for financial services and transactions seriously limit their ability to use or share what little money they have. People have long taken whatever is ready-to-hand to serve the functions of money, from livestock to jewelry, and have used different relationships and objects to help them save, store, and transfer wealth. Today, new communications technologies are being added to this complex ecology of money. This ranges from sharing airtime minutes as an alternative currency, to using mobile phones and point-of-sale terminals for accessing banking institutions, or even as independent systems for saving, storing and transferring wealth.”

The 2010 Annual Report discusses IMTFI’s research in 2008-09 and presents 11 design principles on the creation and implementation of saving services for the poor.

“This is a great example for illustrating the differences between designing for service-centric organisations as compared to designing for product-centric organisations, and it fits nicely with the insight that service design is really an organisational challenge, not an aesthetic one.”

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DESINOVA’s purpose is to enhance innovation among service and trading companies using the methods of user-driven innovation and service design. DESINOVA develops competences for user-driven innovation in trade and service companies and in design companies. More than 25 companies and organisations are participating in DESINOVA.

DESINOVA kicked off in December 2007 and is now moving into its final activities, including the completion of the nine innovation projects, concept and product development, documentation and recommendations, and the establishment of a resource center and network activities.

Some interesting case studies (Spejder Sport and DSB) can be found in the latest English newsletter.

Now Robert Jacobson, guest professor at Malmö University’s MEDEA Program and also involved in DESINOVA, is running an innovation and service design conference (Swedish announcement) next Friday 29 January in Malmö, Sweden, as a first step toward an innovation/services design industry hub in the region.

The conference, during which reports on DESINOVA and on innovation and service design in Sweden will be presented, is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. You can register here.

The conference will be webcast (more info here tomorrow) and we hope to post the presentations on this blog soon afterwards.

The paper, originially commissioned for the World Economic Forum, discusses the opportunities and critical success factors for scaling m-services – services and products for development delivered over the mobile platform. It discusses some of the barriers for scaling m-services and it addresses how industry, donors, and civil society organizations can move from some of the many promising pilot projects in m-health, m-agriculture, and m-payments to economically viable m-services that increase the quality of life and drive economic growth for the poorest of people.

Read paper

For years, the design field focused primarily on developing products that were attractive and convenient for consumers. Now, however, the industry is increasingly eyeing service design, which involves providing products that offer up benefits to society.

“The current trend is to create designs that improve services in the public domain as well as at corporations,” said Lee Young-sun, a chief design officer at the Korea Institute of Design Promotion. As Baik Jong-won, a professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, puts it: “Design that had been merely about making a contribution to beautifying a city environment is now turning into a means of resolving social issues these days.”

Read full story:
- Designing with the public good in mind
- Satisfying customers drives design advances

(via Core77)

Prepare for descent: interaction design in our new future
Jeffrey Wong
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Currently, sustainable interaction design seems primarily focused on behavior change, in the hope of averting irreversible destruction of the environmental systems that make our civilization possible. Underlying this idea is the assumption that the right technology can change behaviors of society-at-large quickly enough to avert irreversible damage. While trying seems more appropriate than doing nothing, current work in Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) is often lacks the scope necessary to foster immediate and deep change needed to avert crises. This paper argues that SID researchers should approach the problem at higher levels to have the massive effects that are necessary. SID should also consider the the design context to be a world radically altered by environmental damage; solutions that fit into today’s lifestyles risk irrelevance. SID researchers can target viable futures by designing for very different social, economic, and humanitarian circumstances than the contexts we currently take for granted. SID allow the projected economic declines to free society from a consumption culture. Research priorities may then shift from prevention and awareness to supporting social, economic, and spiritual structures of society that human happiness possible.

Motivating sustainable energy consumption in the home
Helen Ai He and Saul Greenberg
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Calgary
Technologies are just now being developed that encourage sustainable energy usage in the home. One approach is to give home residents feedback of their energy consumption, typically presented using a computer visualization. The expectation is that this feedback will motivate home residents to change their energy behaviors in positive ways. Yet little attention has been paid to what exactly motivates such behavioral change. This paper provides a brief overview of theories in psychology and social psychology on what does, and does not motivate sustainable energy action in the home.

Visible sustainability: Carbon Label 2.0
Daniela Busse and Wenbo Wang
SAP Labs, LLC
The investment in sustainability research at SAP has been increasing constantly. Of all sustainability parameters, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions produced in the manufacturing, transporting, use, and disposing of a product (aka a product’s carbon footprint), might be the most representative. Next to its more formal efforts on its product lines supporting businesses with their sustainability needs, SAP also held an internal design challenge earlier in 2008 encouraging employees to design a “carbon label” that would communicate this carbon footprint to the consumers of products that were manufactured or sold by SAP’s customers. In response, we conducted some exploratory field research in the form of user interviews, iterated on a design proposal for this carbon label (including a concept investigation), and presented a solution to effectively communicate a product’s carbon to the panel of judges. The final call is still out on this competition, but we posit that the work we did as part of this project shows how a sound user centered design process is critical in making consumer facing sustainability solutions. Given that SAP is one of the major software makers concerned with sustainability solutions for its customers, we hope to firmly situate user centered design practices in the design of upcoming products in SAP’s “green suite” of products. We would like to introduce our work to this CHI workshop on defining the role of HCI for sustainability, invite feedback, and hope to contribute to the broader discussion on this topic.

A sustainable identity: creativity of everyday design
Ron Wakkary
School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University
In this paper we explore sustainability in interaction design by reframing concepts of user identity and use. Building on our work on everyday design, we discuss design-in-use: the creative and sustainable ways people appropriate and adapt designed artifacts. We claim that reframing the user as a creative everyday designer promotes a sustainable user identity in HCI and interaction design.

Sensing opportunities for personalized feedback technology to reduce consumption
Jon Froehlich, Kate Everitt, James Fogarty, Shwetak Patel, James Landay
DUB Institute, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Most people are unaware of how their daily activities affect the environment. Previous studies have shown that feedback technology is one of the most effective strategies in reducing electricity usage in the home. In this position paper, we expand the notion of feedback systems to a broad range of human behaviors that have an impact on the environment. In particular, we enumerate five areas of consumption: electricity, water, personal transportation, product purchases, and garbage disposal. For each, we outline their effect on the environment and review and propose methods for automatically sensing them to enable new types of feedback systems.

Broadening human horizons through green IT
Bill Tomlinson
University of California, Irvine
Environmental concerns such as global climatic disruption occur over long time periods, large distances, and vast scales of complexity. Unassisted, humans are not well equipped to deal with problems on such broad scales. Throughout history, technological innovations have enabled human cultures to engage with broader suites of problems than we would otherwise be able to address. In particular, information technology (IT) involves tools and techniques for dealing with vast bodies of information across wide ranges of time, space, and complexity, and is thus well suited for addressing environmental concerns. While IT carries with it a number of significant environmental challenges (e.g., power consumption, ewaste), the opportunities for improving the sustainability of human civilizations that are enabled by IT are significantly greater than these drawbacks. This paper presents the idea of “extended human-centered computing” – that computing should focus on humans not only to satisfy their immediate needs and desires, but also to extend their horizons with regard to environmental sustainability and other broad scale concerns.

Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour
October 2009
This research aims to develop a design tool for product and service innovation which influences users towards more sustainable behaviour, reducing resource use and leading to a lower carbon footprint for everyday activities. The paper briefly explains the reasoning behind the tool and its structure, and presents an example application to water conservation with concept ideas generated by design students.

Choice architecture and design with intent
June 2009
Motivation – Choice architecture (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) is a phrase of the moment among politicians and economists seeking to influence public behaviour, but the relevance of the concept to designers has received little attention. This paper places choice architecture within the context of Design with Intent—design intended to influence user behaviour. Research approach – The concepts are introduced and choice architecture is deconstructed. Findings/Design – Affordances and Simon’s behavioural model (1955) help understand choice architecture in more detail. Research limitations/Implications – This is only a very brief, limited foray into what choice architecture is. Originality/Value – User behaviour can be a major determinant of product efficiency: user decisions can contribute significantly to environmental impacts. Understanding the reasons behind them, a range of design techniques can be identified to help users towards more efficient interactions. Take away message – The intended outcome is a useful design method for helping users use things more efficiently.

‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view
June 2009
Lockton’s response to the three most design-related questions in the smart meter consultation by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change

Design for behaviour change: The design with intent toolkit v.0.9 [poster]
April 2009
The Design with Intent Toolkit aims to help designers faced with ‘design for behaviour change’ briefs. The poster* features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website.
>> See also these blog posts on what is happening with the toolkit: part 1 and part 2

Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method
April 2009
Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Design with intent: Persuasive technology in a wider context
June 2008
Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour
May 2008
User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

He was trained at Johns Hopkins in preventive medicine and pediatrics. He realized just what a mess the health care system is, with messy delivery processes and frustrating experiences. He figured it could be simpler. So Jay co-founded Hello Health, a novel way of experiencing healthcare via a Facebook-like platform that uses office visits, email, instant messaging and video chat to restore the traditional doctor-patient relationship.

Now Jay has a design firm, The Future Well, focused on creating the future of health and well-being.

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“Social innovation is a process of change where new ideas emerge from a variety of actors directly involved in the problem to be solved: final users, grass roots technicians and entrepreneurs, local institutions and civil society organizations. The main way in which it differs from traditional “garage” innovation is that here the “inventors” are groups of people (the “creative communities”) and the results are forms of organization (the “collaborative services”).

Looking attentively to the complexity of the contemporary society shows many cases of these worldwide (for more, see the Sustainable Everyday project). While the stories are diverse, they have one clear (and expected) common denominator: they resulted from the initiatives of people who collaboratively invented new ways of living and producing and who have been able to enhance them, solving specific problems and, at the same time, making concrete steps towards sustainability happen.”

Read interview

“Think about what lies within the system of banking: people and businesses. Now, do banks do anything to “connect” people and businesses to facilitate transactions amongst and between people and businesses? When was the last time your bank actually helped you do the following:

1. Solve a problem not having to do with a transaction
2. Introduced you or your business to others who may need your product or service
3. Provided you with new information or knowledge that helped you or your business be more productive
4. Helped you or your business grow revenue, besides lending money for you to do it yourself
5. Helped you find relevant and relative resources that you need

The answer to these questions is a bank simply doesn’t do any of these things, at least not consistently and as a regular part of their relations with customers.”

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The BECC conference focused on understanding the behavior and decision making of individuals and organizations and using that knowledge to accelerate our transition to an energy-efficient and low-carbon future.

The conference brought together people from the US and around the world to share the latest insights, research, and experiences pertaining to behavior, energy and climate change.

The 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference was the 3rd annual conference to focus on accelerating our transition to an energy-efficient and low carbon economy through an improved understanding and application of social and behavioral mechanisms of change. This year’s conference built on the overwhelming success of previous BECC Conferences in which participants discussed successful program strategies, shared innovative research findings, and built dynamic new networks and means of collaboration. This conference brought together a diverse group of energy experts, social scientists, and policymakers to discuss the social and behavioral basis for, and practical implementation of, reducing energy use through the adoption and application of more energy-efficient technologies, energy conservation activities, and lifestyle changes.

Download presentations

Related materials:
- New York Times article on the conference
- Reuters article on the conference
- Article by Energy 2.0 Community
- Conference report by attendee Philip Johnson: Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3
- Conference report by attendee Douglas Fisher: Part 1 – Part 2
- Conference report by attendee Scot Holliday
- A review by Experientia’s Irene Cassarino on a similar conference in Europe

“The Dabbawalla service entails collection of freshly prepared meals from the residences of suburban office workers from vast reaches of the city, delivery to their workplaces and the return of empty lunch boxes (dabba or tiffin) to its original home – all for a reasonable monthly fee. Delivering over 200,000 lunch boxes each day to workers who have diverse eating habits (often governed by religion) requires an accurate system – especially as each lunch box commonly passes through the hands of at least six men, in quick exchange, on its path from home to office and back again. Most tiffins are collected by bicycle, sorted into destination groups, then carried together on trains and cycled to the offices of their respective customers. In between they are commonly carried on hand pushed carts and large head-balanced trays – all while jostling with chaotic Mumbai rail and road traffic.

With low literacy being an issue for some of the 5000 dabbawallas, they have devised a coding system using colour, symbols, numbers and a few letters which is painted on the lids of the tiffins to indicate the train lines, hub points and destinations at both ends of the delivery cycle. Each part of the marking can be understood by the relevant dabbawalla as the lunch box exchanges hands through the service chain. In the case that a lunch box gets on the wrong path, the code allows it to be set back on the right track – yielding only one mistake per 6 million deliveries according to economic analysis.”

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In fact, it seems redundant and tiresome to even talk about the subject, let alone take pot-shots at it. We all feel it could be done better. But how?

In terms of design, there is a particular approach that is geared perfectly for health care: experience based design. This discipline focuses design efforts on the sorts of experiences customers have as they interact with a service. Do they feel valued? Do they feel listened to? Is their dignity preserved?

The British National Health Service’s (NHS) Institute for Innovation and Improvement has embraced this approach.

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The energy market liberalization has created new opportunities, also for average citizens, and not only because there is now more choice on the market. We are moving from an energy production monopoly to distributed production: every site can now become a potential energy source. While in the past energy production and management were based on delegation and transfer, now citizens themselves become energy producers, and their contribution is particularly significant with respect to alternative energy sources.

Organic farmer Marco Mariano started the “Adopt a kW” initiative — a cooperative photovoltaic system — in his home region Piedmont, and his very active blog helped spread the idea also to other Italian regions.

The basic concept that underlies “Adopt a kW” — that all citizens can purchase a share of the photovoltaic system — has proven to be successful: many people have joined the project and founded a co-op to run the initiative (called Solare Collettivo). The photovoltaic system is currently hosted in a building owned by a social cooperative in the small Piedmont town of Mondovì. It provides electricity at discount rates and guarantees Solare Collettivo members guaranteed annual savings, the size of which depend on the system’s productivity. Coming from all over Italy, not all Solare Collettivo members can obtain their energy from the Mondovì-based system, yet they are committed to investing in the renewable energy market.

The documentary of the same name was directed by Elena Micheloni and was selected for the 12th edition of the CinemAmbiente Festival in Turin. It shows the process involved in founding and implementing the cooperative photovoltaic system.

In their contribution, Experientia collaborators Michele Visciola, Erin O’Loughlin and Irene Cassarino reflect on how smart tools can help reduce our CO₂ impact, and illustrate this with a case study on the company’s winning proposal (together with ARUP and Sauerbruch Hutton) for the design of a sustainable urban district in the Jätkäsaari area of Helsinki, Finland.

Some people believe that making people consume less and more carefully is not a user-centred approach because it is based on forcing people to give up things. By changing our perspective, we could see another story. We have the ability to leverage the freedom of choice of human beings to consume less to improve their health and the health of the community they belong to. They have to be provided with the right information to understand the value of their actions on their personal wealth and happiness, and tools to make such an understanding actionable. Not to have more, but to be better.

Experientia in Turin, Italy shared with ARUP in London and Sauerbruch-Hutton, in Berlin (an international agency for architecture and urbanism), an international design competition (Low2No): designing a sustainable urban district in the Jätkäsaari area of the city of Helsinki. Our responsibility was to address the delicate theme of how to initiate behavioral change to support a sustainable style of living in this completely renewed urban district.

A comprehensive strategy to facilitate behavioral change has to address the various factors that influence and constrain people’s actions, whether physical, personal, social or cultural. People must feel they have control over their consumption, with actions that have visible effect on it. Smart meters, dynamic pricing systems, and data on cost and peak usage can all address this concern.

Social behavior can also be considered as a community-regulatory process through which people assess and verify their adherence to social norms and policies. We recommended the design and implementation of a large program of design ideas and services aimed at creating social actions and customs based on green values.

Because our perception of what’s possible dictates our standards of what’s acceptable, we suggested included designing incentives to sustain behavioral change, along with sensors and monitoring installations that we expect will affect policy changes well beyond the boundaries of the renewed urban district.

Download article (pre-publication version)

“The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational.”

Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design. He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients. Prior to working at frog, Kolko was a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, sits on the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. Kolko is the author of Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, and the forthcoming text tentatively entitled Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, to be published by Oxford University Press.

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Day one
- The impact of social models – Luke Wroblewski
- Social spaces online: lessons from radical architects – Christina Wodtke
- Making virtual worlds: games and the human for a digital age – Thomas Malaby
- User experience as a crucial driver of social business design – Jeff Dachis
- Bare naked design: reflections on designing with an open source community – Leisa Reichelt
- Does designing a social experience affect how we party? Of course it does! – Maya Kalman
- The information superhighway: urban renewal or neighborhood destruction? – Mary Newsom

Day two
- Innovation parkour – Matthew Milan
- The art and science of seductive interactions – Stephen Anderson
- Social design patterns mini-workshop – Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone
- If you build it (using social media), they will come – Mari Luangrath
- The bawn of perfect products – Tim Queenan

“The contributions to the definition of a disciplinary corpus for service design come from two main directions: the first focuses on real cases, developing projects that are advancing the practice of service design and making service design visible to private business and public administrations (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004; Parker & Heapy, 2006; Thackara, 2007). The second area concerns the definition of a methodological framework for service design. The main concern in those studies is on the development of methodological tools for analysing, designing and representing services. (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004; Morelli, 2003, 2009; Sangiorgi, 2004)

The two areas mentioned above are developed along different disciplinary traditions, from engineering, which emphasise organisational and technical aspects in designing services (Hollins, 1993; Ramaswamy, 1996), to interaction design, which focuses on experiential issues, mainly related to service encounter (Parker & Heapy, 2006; Sangiorgi, 2004), linking service providers and customers. The focus on interaction design, though, has been dominating in several cases of innovative social and public services, whereas engineering studies are defining a clear methodological approach in existing business services. The divergence between the two approaches has inhibited the dialogue between the two areas. The consequences of this are that business services, which are very much rooted in the industrial tradition, focus on production processes rather than on user experience, whereas public services are often very innovative, but cannot overcome the local dimension, because their dominating logic is much closer to craftsmanship than industrial production.”

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(via PSST)

Is Denmark a lead user of user driven innovation?
You might think so since the world’s first government sponsored user driven innovation program is to be found in Denmark. The program aims to strengthen the diffusion of methods for user driven innovation and to contribute to increased growth in the participating companies. It also aims to increase user satisfaction and/or increased efficiency in participating public institutions. Søren Tegen Pedersen is the Deputy Director at the administrative authority of the program.

NFBi – Network for Research-based Userdriven Innovation
The NFBi network was established with the aim of conveying knowledge of userdriven innovation. NFBi plays an active role in facilitating knowledge sharing and matchmaking between enterprises and knowledge environments with expertise in the field.

NFBi Case Study – new Product development in online communities (pdf)
By engaging user-designers and online communities in the new product development process, companies may be able to offer new value propositions, cut NPD cost and reduce the risk of market failure. This project identified the central needs, challenges and opportunities for companies and proposed an outline for a collaborative model, based on research from Copenhagen Business School, experience from Microsoft Dynamics and LEGO, and interviews with designers.

NFBi Case Study – Userdriven Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid (pdf)
What is the differ- ence between userdriven innovation in industrialised countries and in developing countries, and how to work with userdriven innovation together with the Base of the Pyramid?

Social responsibility is visible on the bottom-line (pdf)
A new study shows that companies will increase growth and profits when developing products, which target social and environmental challenges. New collaborative methods and innovation yield positive results for both Danish and international companies.
> Download case studies (pdf)

Project blog on user-driven innovation
Are you interested in how companies involve users in the innovation process? FORA is in the process of analysing how Scandinavian companies apply different methods in the area of user-driven innovation. This is carried out within the framework of the project: Concept Innovation with Users, which has been commissioned by the Nordic Innovation Center.

What next after the Mobile revolution in Kenya?
by John Karanja
MPESA will be on its own a major driver of the economic expansion of the Kenyan economy and best of all it will take a bottom up approach because it will empower the mama mboga (woman grocer) by allowing her to manage her finances efficiently.
[Now] MPESA needs to move from a payment system to a payment gateway: Safaricom should develop MPESA into a platform where other software developers can build applications on top of the platform an thereby increase utility and reach of this technology.
(Make sure to check the embedded videos)

Nokia Life Tools – a life-changing service?
by James Beechinor-Collins
Recently we saw the release of a bunch of new entry level devices and alongside their launch in Indonesia, was the introduction of Nokia Life Tools for Indonesia. This follows an already successful launch in India and Africa and forms part of a rollout across select Asian and African countries. So does it make a difference? It would seem so, as our selection of videos below suggest. With over 50 per cent of the population in Indonesia reliant on agriculture to make a living, Nokia Life Tools brings a new level of control to them.
(Make sure to check the embedded videos)

Mythes et réalités des usages mobiles dans les pays en développement
[Myths and realities of mobile use in developing countries] – an article series in French
by Hubert Guillaud
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Bangladeshis rush to learn English by mobile
By Maija Palmer in London and Amy Kazmin in New Delhi for the Financial Times
More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia’s poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their mobile phones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch on Friday.
The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a UK government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that mobile phones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.