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 computing
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 population
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 “typical
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 estimates
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 dominant
languages. Many languages are spoken only by small communities,
for which it is cost-prohibitive to localize software. Are there