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Diversifying Future-Making Through Itinerative Design

Published: 29 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

“Designed in California” is a brand statement used by high-tech manufacturers to denote provenance and cachet of digital innovation and modernity. In this paper, we explore philosophically alternate design perspectives to those this statement embodies, reporting and reflecting on a long-term multi-sited project that seeks to diversify future-making by engaging communities of “emergent” users in “developing” regions. We argue that digital technologies are typically created with a design lens firmly focused on “first world” populations, assuming a base set of cultural norms, resource availabilities, and technological experience levels that do not strongly align with those of emergent users. We discuss and argue for inclusive technology design methods, present our approach, and detail indicative results and case studies as an example of the potential of these perspectives in uncovering radical innovations. Distilling findings and lessons learned, we present a methodology—itinerative design—that pivots between emergent user communities across multiple regions, driving digital innovation through the periphery of mainstream design’s current remit.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 26, Issue 5
October 2019
249 pages
ISSN:1073-0516
EISSN:1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/3349608
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 29 July 2019
Accepted: 01 May 2019
Revised: 01 March 2019
Received: 01 June 2018
Published in TOCHI Volume 26, Issue 5

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Author Tags

  1. Itinerative design
  2. co-creation
  3. emergent users
  4. future-making

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Cited By

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  • (2024)A Multi-Process System for Investigating Inclusive Design in User Interfaces for Low-Income CountriesAlgorithms10.3390/a1706023217:6(232)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
  • (2023)No More “Solutionism” or “Saviourism” in Futuring African HCI: A ManyfestoACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/357181130:2(1-42)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Light-In-Light-Out (Li-Lo) Displays: Harvesting and Manipulating Light to Provide Novel Forms of CommunicationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517730(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Opportunities and Challenges of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Low-Resource Language SpeakersProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517639(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2021)PV-Pix: Slum Community Co-design of Self-Powered Deformable Smart Messaging MaterialsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445661(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2021)Gifting in Museums: Using Multiple Time Orientations to Heighten Present-Moment EngagementHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2021.192349637:2(180-210)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2021
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