Beginning in the mid-1990s, efforts to apply electronic technology to development were revived with the commoditization of digital tech- nologies. The personal computer (PC) kicked off this recent wave of technology for development, and early work considered how PCs could help non-profits and other development-focused organizations stream- line their operations. This application of PCs, of course, is not very different from the use of PCs in offices, and so few people with inter- ests in innovation took notice.
By the late 1990s, however, a new phenomenon was beginning, ush- ering in what could be considered the first big wave of ICT4D: the telecenter. Though burdened with many names — “PC kiosks,” “rural kiosks,” “village knowledge centers” — and many different shades of meaning, a reasonable definition is that telecenters are physical centers “which exist primarily to provide the general public access to comput- ing and/or the Internet with the explicit intent to serve a developmen- tal purpose.” They are related to, but “different from public phone booths, from computer classrooms, from rural data-entry centres, from computerized post offices, and from Internet cafes” [138].
Because of their developmental focus, telecenters are typically placed in or near poor neighborhoods, both rural and urban, and seek out clientele from economically poor backgrounds. This difference in locus turns out to have a dramatic impact on usage styles and statis- tics. As early telecenter implementers quickly discovered, this reality prompted a range of questions that would make any HCI researcher shiver with excitement: what kind of client is most likely to use a tele- center [139]? How do clients respond to user interfaces in languages they are not fluent in [58]? What sort of social interaction occurs if you allow distant telecenters to communicate via video teleconference [65]? How can clients be encouraged to partake of telecenter services [10]? Does the placement and orientation of the PC influence usage paradigms [132]?
Telecenters as a whole are difficult to operate [121], and so the suc- cess of any single telecenter is often crucially dependent on the answer to these kinds of questions. These days, it is rare to read reports and case studies of telecenters without finding a section that reads much like a tutorial on doing HCI: Identify a real problem. Involve the user