Thought Paper: September 13

Of the essays (chapters) in Critical Cyberculture Studies for this week's readings, Beth Kolko’s “Cultural Considerations in Internet Policy and Design: A Case Study from Central Asia” really hit home with me. My background in design and my cynical view of the American-centric our-way-is-the-best-way approach to dealing with the rest of the world made me receptive to Kolko’s argument that culturally appropriate design (often overlooked and understudied) can be a “powerful avenue for intervention.”

Often the debate about adoption and use of information and communication technology (ICT) is only about cables and computers. It is a “build it, they will come” attitude, without considering the broader social and community norms and conventions. The author uses her work and research in Central Asia as a case study of technology usage in a non-Western society. A society without the assumptions and meanings of Western metaphors and iconology; so she asks, is the Windows' desktop interface—with its filing cabinet, folders and trash can—the most appropriate graphic user interface (GUI) for a non-American/European to use to interact with the technology? For that matter, is it the most useful metaphor for America’s rural, blue collar or the economically disadvantaged people to use for accessing and interacting with computers?

Everett Rogers describes the process of diffusion as a series of steps a population takes to make the move from non-users to users. First, the innovators become users, followed by early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally laggards. Rogers describes innovators as being risk takers and are willing to adapt to systems that are outside of traditional social norms. Kolko suggests that good design should be geared to late stage adopters through to the laggards, the very people that the advocates of ICT are trying to reach, and not to the risk takers and innovators.

The essay reminded me of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program that is working to provide computers to children in third world countries. One of its challenges was to recreate the user experience, as its website states:

The desktop metaphor is so entrenched in personal computer users' collective consciousness that it is easy to forget what a bold and radical innovation the Graphical User Interface (GUI) was and how it helped free the computer from the “professionals” who were appalled at the idea of computing for everyone.

OLPC is about to revolutionize the existing concept of a computer interface.

Beginning with Seymour Papert's simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So…we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities. (link)

Not only is the hardware important for this new venture, but the OLPC needed to radically rethink the metaphors and icons that the children would use to interact and utilize the technology. Instead of forcing the children to adapt to the old metaphor of the desktop in order to successfully use the laptops, the new OLPC GUI would adapt to the community—multi-languages, icons based on international symbols—and the goal of the laptops to facilitate learning and collaboration—icons that visually represent the community of laptops (users) and activities being joined, not an office or business environment.

Design will not solve all of the digital divide issues—infrastructure and hardware is still an obstacle to adoption—but design can help to bridge the gap. As long as the individual and a community is expected to adapt to the pro-Western system of metaphors in order to use ICT, there will always be laggards, resisters and non-adopters. Maybe it is time to stop expecting the world to march to America’s technological drumbeat.