Overcoming Blind Spots in Interaction Design: A Case Study in Designing for African AIDS Orphan Care Communities
Donald J. Patterson, Susan Elliott Sim, Tosin Aiyelokun · 2009
The process of designing technological systems for the developing world is a challenging task. In a project that we undertook in the summer of 2007 using an iterative design process, we attempted to develop delay-tolerant network-ing technology on mobile phones to support workers at AIDS orphanages in Zambia and South Africa. Despite extensive preparations and research, we found that conditions on the ground were radically different from what we had anticipated, and we had to quickly re-group and redeªne our strategic goals. This experience made us realize that, for this type of design, resiliency and contingency planning were the most valuable tools in our interaction de-sign toolbox. In response to changing conditions, we rapidly prototyped a dif-ferent mobile telephony application called Nomatic*AID that provides a feed-back loop among donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and ªeld workers. In this paper, we reºect on the redirection of our work once we reached our ªeld site and our resulting acceptance of design blind spots. We