researchers” were involved, and it will continue to be true, until the failure of the last gadget in the world’s last non-profit organization. HCI has great potential to influence global development where com- puting technology is involved, and its methodology could be a model for development even without technology.
What about the converse? What can HCI gain from engaging with global development? Hopefully, this article will provide an adequate basis for readers to come to their own conclusions, but here are some possibilities.
First, global development presents largely unexplored territory for HCI research, terrain which will become increasingly relevant. In 2008, there were 1.2 billion PCs in use [23], and most of HCI so far has been focused on those 1.2 billion devices. This means that a much larger group of people, numbering over 5 billion, has not been addressed by the majority of HCI research — many of them live in cultures that may respond in new ways to modern technology, and in any case their experience with computing devices will be different from past users. While this latter population is largely unfamiliar with PCs, they are meanwhile becoming rapidly familiar with another powerful computing device — the mobile phone. There were 4.6 billion active mobile-phone accounts in the world in 2009 [63]; this is more than the total popula- tion of the world today who are over 20 years of age.2 All this suggests that what ought to be considered the “typical user” and the “typi- cal computing device” will shift from what have been the traditional concerns of HCI and computer science more broadly.
Beyond such quantitative trends, ICT4D also poses qualitatively new questions to the HCI community. For example, UNESCO esti- mates that in 2009 there were 774 million illiterate adults in the world [143], and this number is likely conservative. How should one design user interfaces for non-literate users? And, even if you can read in your own language, software is written primarily for the world’s dom- inant languages. Many languages are spoken only by small commu- nities, for which it is cost-prohibitive to localize software. Are there
2 These statistics do not necessarily mean that every adult on the planet owns a compute- intensive mobile phone, as many countries have penetration rates above 100%, and indi- vidual phone ownership in the world’s very poorest communities still remains rare.