adoption

Perspectives

Owning Our Devices: Learning from People Who Adapt Tech for Well-Being

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An interview with MARGARET MORRIS by ANNA ZAVYALOVA & GIULIA NICOLINI, Stripe Partners Public debate has rightly focused on the perils and toxicity of new technologies, and questioned the motivations of the companies building them. Meanwhile though, people are creatively adapting technology to their own social and psychological needs. Margie Morris explores this crucial space of personal innovation for social connection and well-being in her new book Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim our Relationships, Health, and Focus. Margie is a clinical psychologist, researcher, and inventor of technologies which support well-being. She led research on emotional technology at Intel, conducted user experience at Amazon and now teaches in the department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. Based on years of primary and secondary research as well as Margie’s own involvement in creating apps and other technologies, the book offers a fresh take on human-technology interaction,...

Intelligences

Market Creation Through Community Engagement: Combining Ethnographic and Business Thinking to Bridge Life-Changing Technologies to Emerging Economies

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CRAIG CISERO Frog ROBERTA TASSI Frog Emerging technologies such as drones, sensors, mesh networks and IoT have significant potential to bring new life-changing services and benefits to places where infrastructure and ICT access is still limited. Nevertheless, many companies have already failed in the attempt to bring new solutions to the underserved population in emerging markets due to gaps in understanding capability and lack of systemic approach....

Intelligences

Everyday Life in Tamil Nadu, India and Its Cost to “Free Basics”

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SHRIRAM VENKATRAMAN University College London NIMMI RANGASWAMY Xerox Research Centre, India This paper explores how the ‘Free Basics’ initiative in India got transformed into a national debate on ‘net neutrality’ principle and finally led to it being banned in India. Further, this paper will also use ethnographic data to analyse how this ‘controversial’ initiative was debated, the claims it made and the actual ground level reality in the state of Tamil Nadu....

Intelligences

#GoingEthno in the Indian Bureaucracy

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AAKASH SOLANKI International Innovation Corps (IIC) at the University of Chicago SARVESH TEWARI International Innovation Corps (IIC) at the University of Chicago Case Study—Based on experience of working in the Department of School Education, Government of Haryana on a Management Information System being built to reduce administrative workload on teachers and bureaucrats, this case study describes how ethnography was used to understand and address the problem of technology adoption in a large bureaucracy. Ethnography helped the Department in framing the problem of adoption as one of lack of adequate Digital Literacy within the organization and in developing strategies to address it. Digital Literacy workshops were conducted to improve broader Digital Literacies in the Department, which improved literacy levels by 48%. For ensuring sustainability of this initiative, the Department instituted a continuous Digital Literacy program, which will support the adoption of multiple technology projects in the future. Keywords: Management...

Intelligences

Challenges to Internet Connectivity in the Himalayan Foothills

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MIN LIESKOVSKY LUFI PARIS ANDREW FIORE Facebook, Inc. Understanding Internet connectivity in remote regions presents a host of logistical and methodological challenges. As researchers and business professionals, we cannot just assume that these places are simply Unconnected. We must understand the challenges people face in connecting, in what ways they have connectivity, and in what ways they do not. This paper examines research methods and framing to investigate Internet connectivity options for residents of the diverse terrain of the Himalayan foothills....

Intelligences

The Local Ingenuity: Maximizing Livelihood through Improvising Current Communication Access Technology

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ANDREW WONG This paper presents what it means for the low income, non user segment to have ‘technological voices’ and in turn ‘be heard’ socially and economically. It argues that the ICT liberates low income people to explore ways in which technology might help to support their livelihood. We draw on recent ethnographic research conducted in Bangladesh on the low income, non user segment. Some of the questions this paper seeks to answer are as follows: What constraints do people have when using communication access technology? How do they modify communication access technology to better suit their lifestyle and livelihood? As the provider of service, how can we be constantly aware of the need to modify features and make the necessary modifications?...

Intelligences

Cracking Representations of Emerging Markets: It’s Not Just about Affordability

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KATHI KITNER, RENEE KURIYAN and SCOTT D. MAINWARING This paper will examine the social factors that mediate technology adoption among the emerging middle class in order to show how messaging, positioning, and targeting communications to potential consumers, if based on flawed representations, such as the First Time Buyer, can lead to missed market opportunities, or worse. We advocate an alternative approach based on ethnographic frameworks that can help to gauge the social viability of products, deconstructing these assumptions and notions to help smooth the path of technology adoption in emerging markets. To represent our findings, we created a “tool,” the “Social Viability Measure (SVM),” to help private industry and others approach new markets by bringing an understanding of social forces into the strategic planning, messaging and positioning of products....

Intelligences

The Calculus of Small Change: An Ethnography of Unlearning

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MARIJKE RIJSBERMAN Technological innovation obsolesces not only earlier technologies, but also the knowledge, skills, and expertise of the users of those technologies. Individual obsolescence is generally written off as the cost of participation in a vibrant capitalist economy, a small price to pay and part of the creative destruction that makes the entire system work. This paper takes a closer look at the individual costs of such obsolescence, through an investigation of the particular class of changes that present themselves subsequent to an individual’s adoption decision—updates, upgrades, service packs, redesigns, patches, bug fixes, feature releases, versions, and other putative enhancements crowding into the contemporary technological landscape with increasing frequency. Updates make up a much-neglected but significant proportion of the total number of changes that make their way to those who participate—whether whole-heartedly or with reservations, willingly or as the unsought consequence of their participation in the labor...