Understanding Computers and Society — International Development and Design
Questions We Need to Answer Right Now — Part 4
If we could revive people from the early 1900s, we’d surely wow them with our fancy gadgets and “magical” technological prowess. But would the current state of the world not disappoint them?
They’d probably ask us simple questions. Why is it that in a world of 2 billion Facebook users, there are a billion without access to electricity? Why is it that while netizens celebrate the launch of foldable smartphones costing US$2000, 800 million others do not have access to clean water? Why is it that as we push the frontiers of knowledge faster than ever before, more than 10% of the population is illiterate? Why is it that in a civilization that is more advanced than ever before, we have mindless wars and refugee crises?
Why can’t we use tech to make the world a better place?
I’ll only try and take a jab at the last question today. There are mainly two reasons. We’ve historically been:
(1) approaching international development with the wrong mindset.
(2) horrible at designing tech-driven solutions for the less fortunate.
[This article is part 4 of a series of articles exploring the various dimensions of computers that give rise to questions pertaining to society. You can find part 1 (Introduction and Ethics) here.]
1. International Development
Before we can talk about how technology is driving international development, let’s take a short detour for a primer.
Instead of using the terms “First World”/“Developed” and “Third World”/“Developing” countries, let us divide countries into the Global North (well-off) and the Global South (poorer). Thanks largely to colonization, the Global North was developed first. Over time, as the memories of plunder faded, people grew the impression that the Global North must be doing something right. This mentality is reflected in Rostow’s Modernization Theory, and big organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank started dispersing foreign aid to the Global South in order to promote free-market economies (privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization).
All this sounds good, but foreign aid has been largely considered unsuccessful and attracted its fair share of criticism. Critics claim that the receipients were not properly engaged in the decision-making processes, leading to poor assessment of real needs. It also enabled corruption in developmental projects, ignored traditional practices of the region (perhaps from some inborn sense of superiority), and cared little about sustainability. Regardless of the success of the foreign aid program, the recipients are left to pay back the loan, hence pushing them further into debt. The cycle of poverty continues. Dependency Theory argues that exploitation is at the heart of foreign aid, thanks to the power dynamics of the relationship.
This has gotten people thinking about other, more realistic approaches to international development. Two leading theories are the Human Development approach and the Sustainable Development approach. The Human Development approach aims to remove the “unfreedoms” (i.e. factors outside one’s control that block people from reaching their true potential). The Sustainable Development approach wants to reach these goals while making sure it’s environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. The Sustainable Development approach gained a lot of traction after the UN unveiled the 17 SDGs in 2015.
Despite what our inner cynics feel, data shows that the world is getting better. We are at a point in time where there are fewer wars, less poverty, fewer people dying of preventable diseases etc. But does technological development coincide with positive trends? Not necessarily, according to Kentaro Toyama. In a really good talk, Toyama shows how major technological shifts had no positive effect on the US poverty rate.
Toyama instead argues that “technology only amplifies underlying human forces. Therefore human forces determine the actuality and direction of technology’s impact.” He further claims that despite what the tech companies say about their grand visions, the bottom line of the company comes first. Thanks to increasing productivity and decreasing costs, the people who are making a profit from technological advances are big corporations. To really impact the world through technology, grassroots technologists must organize.
There have been projects with grand visions run by people with good intentions. In January 2005, the One Laptop Per Child organization kicked off with backing from very smart, driven volunteers and support from governments and the UN. Over the next decade, the OLPC failed to make its vision a reality. The Hole-In-The-Wall project is another example of such a failure. Both these projects (1) failed to realize the true needs of the very people it was trying to help, and (2) projected their vision of development onto them.
(Efforts have continued in technology-driven development despite these failures. Examples are Digital Green, CGNet Swara. There are numerous efforts tackling issues such as accessibility, health, poverty, social restrictions, cultural restrictions, oppression, etc. Whether these efforts are more sensible/successful in the long run in comparison to their predecessors remains to be seen.)
Furthermore, there have been recent (3) concerns about Digital Colonialism. The Global South, which has only very recently gotten rid of Classic Colonialism, are becoming acutely aware that by controlling the digital infrastructure of the world, the Global North are silently taking over the world once more. Therefore, more recent technology-driven international development projects have to overcome this mental barrier and apprehension repeatedly. Even seemingly harmless projects (such as the disease eradication projects by the Gates Foundation) experience significant resistance from this mindset.
On the other hand, some development projects (such as Facebook’s attempt to provide internet to the disconnected masses) are laced with (4) ethical concerns. Facebook handpicked a number of websites that people could access from this new free-to-use service. This would essentially create a different digital reality for the kid who gets on “the internet” for the first time in her life, one that is controlled by Facebook. Lots of projects try and export old hardware to poor countries, in the hopes of providing them access to hardware considered outdated for the Global North. In reality, these contribute to the e-waste problem. Some startups claim they’re creating jobs in places with high unemployment rates, when all they’re doing is increasing worker exploitation (see ride-share, delivery-drivers, click-farms). Often, these projects end up (5) doing more harm than good.
The problem with technology-driven international development is that we (wrongly) perceive these complicated human problems to be simple, well-defined tech problems. We forget that technology is only a tool.
2. Design
To further unravel why tech isn’t yet able to make the world a better place, we have to look at the problem of design. Another primer (Sorry!).
A design is a “purpose, plan, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.” As engineers and designers, we can take different approaches to design. Let’s look at a few paradigms and see why this is tricky business.
In Activity-Centered Design, we start by listing down what action we want to take, observe how that is done in some related field, and attempt to replicate subjects to our constraints. If we wanted to be able to fly, here is how our thought process would go: I want to fly; birds can fly; birds have wings; I need wings; wings have some mechanical properties; can I simulate those mechanical properties? The limitation of this paradigm is observation. Firstly, our inspiration is limited by our knowledge/imagination — you can’t observe anything and everything without some clue for where to look. Secondly, we may misinterpret observations. Western researchers often misinterpret local traditions in rural areas as “backdated” and try to eliminate it. Only after their solutions fail are they able to grasp the significance of the “backdated” way of doing things. Our biases, shaped by our social context, might get in the way of good design. The result: we project our preconceived notions of what a community needs, and it is often far from what they actually need.
Maybe (read: obviously) we should ask the community we’re trying to help. Focus on the user. This is User-Centered Design. You first have to empathize with the user — create an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve and set aside your premature assumptions. You understand the what-how-whys of the problem through individual interviews, group discussions, and surveys. You try to understand the right problem, so you don’t go around trying to tackle the symptoms of the problem instead. Next, you need to define a problem statement that is broad enough to accommodate creative freedom but narrow enough to make it manageable. Then you ideate (brainstorm ideas using creative and curious activities), prototype, test, and take user feedback into account after every iteration. Dozens of iterations later, you’ll have the actual solution — one that is desirable (by humans), feasible (tech), and viable (business). The problem with this process arises when you have to design a desk for a prison cell. If you consult the inmates, they’ll obviously want features that will help them escape. How do we get around this issue?
Helen Nissenbaum, one of the pioneers of Value-Sensitive Design (VSD), proposes a solution. She says that every design materializes a value. And if we look at the artifacts a society uses, we can infer the values they treasure the most. If you look at our tech-enthusiasts, we prefer faster, lighter, smaller, better things. If you look at church-goers, they may prefer peace, quiet and tranquility more. VSD says we must (1) understand the values of the stakeholders/society, (2) design with the people who uphold the values, and (3) evaluate our solution on a value-scale. The problem: a lot of room for subjectivity, interpretation, and conflicts.
Another approach is Persuasive Design — practices that focus on influencing human behavior. We can see this used highly addictive apps: we want to scroll the feed just one more time, tap on one more story, click on one more article. This form of design is based on Fogg’s Behavior Model. The design tries to eliminate obstacles in the way of desired action, increase motivation to take said action, and triggers prompts at the right times. As with all approaches, this has its limitations too. It is very difficult to create an equally persuasive design for all users.
The last approach we’ll mention is called Critical Design. “Critical design object plays a role of product design but emphasizes on neither commercial purpose nor physical utility. It is mainly used to share a critical perspective and “increase awareness on social, cultural, or ethical issues by asking questions” (Wikipedia). For example, Facebook now has an activity tracker that tells you how much time you’re wasting on their platform. This makes no sense commercially at all, but this tries to bring awareness to the user. Few would question the values behind this addition.
Believe it or not, designing a product is tough. You can explore lots of these hilarious design fails at r/CrappyDesign.
Expanding on problems (1) and (2) from the end of the International Development section above, most of these tech-driven development projects fail because they try to fit in a generic, pre-designed product into a new challenge. If we could employ sound design principles when trying to help people around the globe, we’d be going a lot further.
Armed with this knowledge, many design consultancies have spun out “social innovation” arms to try and tackle development challenges. Unfortunately, they’ve found that our current design principals don’t always fare particularly well. In a Fast Company article, Panthea Lee (founder of Reboot) talks of a growing nervousness because “design for development” seems to be falling short of its promises. She thinks this is because (1) metrics for the commercial space are not easily ported over to the development space, and (2) projects today focus on the edges of a complex system that actually needs fundamental (rather than incremental) changes. She believes that it is important to realize that only one design project wouldn’t be enough to circumvent a decade long process.
We’re facing ocean-sized problems armed with teaspoons. — Panthea Lee, Founder of Reboot
The article does end with a positive note though. “But if we’re willing to tackle the thorny problems, to get involved in messy policy and political debates, and to go head-to-head with organizations and interests that would prefer we didn’t ask the tough questions, designers can be part of larger solutions.”, writes Lee.
“Each of us may only have a teaspoon. But if we’re all scooping in the right direction, maybe we can start to make some waves.”
Powerful stuff. If that doesn’t inspire you to go out and help people, I don’t know what will.
I’ve tried to break the multi-part series down to readable chunks, tackling issues at a time, so that the main message is not diluted. If you have any feedback regarding the article, feel free to reach out to me. If you liked the article and think more people should know about it, pass it to a friend!
This piece was inspired by CSC300: Computers and Society, taken at the University of Toronto during Fall 2019, under Ishtiaque Ahmed. Please note that the opinions in this piece are only my own.
