I’ve always felt most at home in rural, sans tourist areas, and developing countries. During my initial trips, I was shocked at the prevalent use of mobile phones when the traditional infrastructure was so limited. I was also embarrassed by the humility with which very intelligent people would ask me to help them use their phones. One of my first experiences was distributing mobile phones and teaching first time users how to operate these phones in rural Uganda. My thoughts and observations sat with me and grew over the course of nearly 10 years. I later shared my experiences in a spirited conversation with my future research partner, Sebastian Heyecke. This conversation led to my work with Adaptive Path on the Mobile Literacy project.

Every year, I take at least two months off from work and do a personal research project. I consider it to be “spending time with family.” I go with no expectations except a curiosity and a desire to be close to and understand my “brothers and sisters.” I seek out a subject matter that I want to dig into to form my own opinions. This endeavor provides me with a level of independence and purity that is vital to generating fresh and unconstrained research findings. I am grateful to have crossed paths with Adaptive Path who helped plan and fund the project.

In a stakeholder interview with the Jesse James Garrett, President, Adaptive Path, Sebastian and I were given the freedom to rely on our intuitive understanding of the people we were hoping to serve through our research. He encouraged us to sit quietly at the end of every day and question which mobile phone constraints were truly constraints. He also suggested we follow our instincts as we made decisions through the research process.

I’d like to share how we conducted our research and hopefully encourage more designers to bring this unfiltered reality into our world.

Do what feels true

“Do what feels true” can be misconstrued and abused depending on the researcher. It is very different than “do what it takes.” Both require a good gut instinct and a fair amount of intelligence. The former demands you research with boldness, while the latter allows you to research in a way that may be effective, but has the tendency to center on something other than people. The focus of the Mobile Literacy project could have easily slipped towards the mobile phone, a certain number of interviewees, or the expectations of our peers.

This research was a chance to visit our brothers and sisters. It was a trip to find out what was really going on with them. Like a lot of other designers, I had a hunch, based on my previous visits to rural areas, that mobile phones are not meeting the needs of the people in rural areas. Numerous other organizations and researchers are on the same track, but we were driven to make direct contact with individuals and the phone contextually, not just with the phone.

Mobile phones provide users with personal empowerment. Our research focused on this fundamental idea by exploring:

1.    Instances where the mobile phone disempowered individuals by failing to fully support their needs and culture. This allowed us to:

• Redefine mobile literacy and recognize the obstacles that the phone’s assumed metaphors created
• Understand gender dynamics within a family
• Witness implications due to the lack of transparent commodity prices

2.    How the mobile phone supports ingenuity and empowerment, including:

• Additional interdependence in existing personal relationships between customers and shopkeepers or vendors
• Informal extensions of credit as a result of better relationships and stronger bonds of trust
• Decentralized efforts to aid rural inhabitants in accessing healthcare by using the phonebook in the mobile phone as a blood bank register

To gather our information, we pushed out of our own comfort zones deep into theirs to get to the people that needed to be heard. Once there, our goal was to provide a safe space and to inspire confidence, allowing our participants to openly share their experiences. Conducting research with this mentality allowed us to get personal with the people we sought to understand and to hear their issues within a short time frame.

We achieved this through several approaches:

1. I explained to each interviewee, particularly as we went deeper into rural India, that the troubles they were having understanding the phone was something that could be fixed. It was something that they could help us fix. I put a great deal of effort into this part of the process. I explained quite honestly the devices are made in the West by people who know nothing about their lifestyle. I used the analogy of sending a sari in a box to an American who had never met an Indian. The American would have no clue how to wear it.  This explanation helped set us on equal footing with the interviewee.
2. I interviewed the head of a family living in an isolated town in ranch-style conditions. We stayed the evening there, helping with chores, preparing for dinner, and basically slowing down enough to avoid intruding upon the usual flow of their daily life. This included speaking less and in a quieter voice (not my standard way of communicating!)
3. The quality of the research depended heavily on the personal involvement of the participants. For example, take the issue of language. While I can speak Kutchi with confidence, each town we visited had a different dialect Moreover, words that were specific to mobile phones were difficult to grasp for both sides. I had to constantly tweak my vocabulary and my accent in order to be understood. Similarly, the participants had to extend themselves, even enlist the help of their friends, in order for me to understand them.
4. We kept our team small. This allowed us to stay flexible and below the radar most of the time.
5. We attended community festivities and I purchased traditional sweets to share with our neighbors and newfound friends.

We consciously performed these activities, not to just locate participants and gather information but to “land” in Kutch. Our efforts allowed us to actively engage with our participants and to become participants ourselves.

Social Design

When I think of the research participants as part of my family, my interactions with them take on level of responsibility and respect. It removes the tendency to (intentionally or unintentionally) mine people for information. I listen more attentively. I feel more like I am standing next to the participant as opposed to opposite to them. We compensate participants not only with money but also with respect, candidness, and humanness. We adopted their language to explain that we value them and their obstacles; both sides are “participants” in the research.

I am an entrepreneur by nature. I currently run a social enterprise because I need to see my organization and my staff as individuals that are personally important to me, part of my family. I carried this worldview with me into this research. If you are interested in designing for developing countries, be sure to connect with people out of pure curiosity and with a blank slate. If you are a designer, see the world as your family. Nothing parallels the experience of using your professional skillset to empower people who are so accustomed to not having a voice that they forgot that they had one.

I am in awe of the work designers can do. The design community consistently impacts our everyday lives. I hold this project close to my heart. I specifically appreciate Adaptive Path’s investment in listening to my thoughts and insights and distilling our knowledge into actionable research findings, design principles, and concepts. They have transformed the research with their talented and well-trained eyes into something useful for others.