Ed Cutrell
Microsoft Research
HCI4D: Cultural learnings of India for make benefit glorious field of HCI

In 2010 I moved to India to begin working in what was for me a new and exciting area of research, ICT4D (ICTs for global development). An important thread in ICT4D research is understanding how the unique context and constraints of developing communities affects the design and goals for systems and technologies, and how these are taken up by end users and beneficiaries: HCI, or what we've come to call HCI4D. Like Borat in America, I will guide you through some fascinating experiences in India that illustrate the importance of understanding the broader context and motivations of the people you're working with. What are their needs and how do we understand if our designs actually meet them? When you ask people what they think about your work, they'll almost inevitably tell you whatever they think you want to hear, even when it's obviously untrue. And an easy-to-use, special purpose system for collecting health information may be junked for a complicated phone application because users want to use the phone for lots of *other* things. To paraphrase Field Marshall Moltke, "No system design survives contact with users in the field", and these issues are massively amplified in the context of HCI4D. As Gary Marsden from University of Cape Town liked to say, HCI for developing regions isn't a different field - it's just extreme HCI.

Ed Cutrell manages the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group at Microsoft Research India. TEM is a multidisciplinary group working to study, design, build, and evaluate technologies and systems useful for people living in underserved rural and urban communities. The goal of this work is to understand how people in the world's poor and developing communities interact with information technologies, and to invent new ways for technology to meet their needs and aspirations. Ed has worked in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) since 2000; he is trained in cognitive neuropsychology, with a PhD from the University of Oregon.