These are the kinds of questions asked by a growing field called “infor- mation and technology for development,” or ICT4D. ICT4D considers how technologies such as the personal computer, mobile phone, and the Internet can contribute to global socio-economic development of economically impoverished communities.
Many of the questions of ICT4D are those that people in human– computer interaction have been asking for decades in other contexts. In fact, HCI already figures prominently in ICT4D projects, though it is not always called “HCI.” The Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group on computer-human interaction (ACM SIGCHI) defines human–computer interaction as “a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena sur- rounding them” [54, 55]. By this definition, all of the questions enumer- ated above could be considered legitimate questions of HCI. In fact, in their foundational textbook on HCI, Schneiderman and Plaisant wrote, “As a profession, we will be remembered for how well we meet our users’ needs. That’s the ultimate goal: addressing the needs of all users” [124].
A key tenet of this article, therefore, is that HCI is central to ICT4D — it was so even before people who called themselves “HCI