Mexico

Intelligences

Searching for the Next Billion: Global Design for Information Seeking across Cultures

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JENNIFER ZAMORA Google Inc. While billions of people are established internet users, there are still billions of new users who have just come online in recent years and this growth will continue, especially on mobile in non-Western countries. Information seeking is essential to online behavior across the world, yet many prominent information-seeking platforms are heavily influenced by Western design patterns and use cases that originate from desktop. As we anticipate the future of information-seeking designs for new users, we explore opportunities to improve the experience by establishing a framework to evaluate common barriers to information seeking online across cultures. Qualitative insights were collected from 164 participants to understand information-seeking patterns and barriers for users across three countries: Nigeria, Mexico, and India. Interviews were conducted with participants in their day-to-day environment, including home, work, internet cafes, markets, and university campuses. For every region, the overarching...

Intelligences

Map Making: Mobilizing Local Knowledge and Fostering Collaboration

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NORA MORALES UAM Cuajimalpa, México SALOMON GONZALEZ UAM Cuajimalpa, México Participatory mapping—the production of maps in a collective way—is a common activity used for planning and decision making in urban studies. It started as a way to empower men and women, usually from rural vulnerable communities threatened by climate change, degradation of their landfills or any other conflict related to access to their land. It has been considered a fundamental instrument to help marginal groups represent and communicate their needs within the territory and augment their capacity to protect their rights. (FIDA, 2011). Why is it that in some cases participatory mapping works and in others fails? Why do these initiatives not trigger local action? Or even end up being counterproductive, when authorities use the map made by locals, to validate their points, causing conflict instead of negotiation? As a research team of designers and social scientists involved in the creation of participatory mapping workshops, our goal was to analyze...

Intelligences

Life and Death of Evidence: The role of digital interactions during Mexico’s earthquake

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FRANCISCO JAVIER PULIDO RAMIREZ INSITUM PechaKucha Presentation Social media played a fundamental role on Mexico's earthquake, it bring us new solutions but created some other problematics that were unexpected. Millions of users shared their experiences faster than any other traditional media but the use and abuse of their evidence impacted the way we faced the crisis. Earthquakes are extreme case scenarios where social medias couldn't forecast the different consequences of their design decisions that impacts people's lifes. As producers of contents, all our evidence is storage on the digital sphere, always available, unchangeable, static, waiting to be rescue for interpretation. Most of the evidence that generate chaos after the earthquake happened because they were digitally alive, being shared over and over without control, for hours and days and when it finally reach you it was no longer useful. But on a scenario where temporality is crucial and minutes can define life or death, should we kill our evidences in pro for a better...