A New Organization to Address Poverty Through Human-Centered Design

Reposted without edits from IDEO.com IDEO announces new organization to address poverty through human-centered design. March 7, 2011 — Palo Alto, Calif. — Today IDEO announced that in the fall of this year, it will launch a new organization aimed at spreading human-centered design throughout the social sector in order […]

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Mobile Technology, Gender and Development

Mobile Technology, Gender and Development is a University of Jyväskylä based research project focusing on the use and cultural meanings of mobile technology in Africa, India and Bangladesh. From the first post on their blog: We are a group of five anthropologists doing research on mobile technology, gender and development. […]

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Technology Snapshot: Indigenous Language & Cultural Preservation

How is the web impacting aboriginal communities? Phillip Djwa’s work focuses on the key components of social responsibility through technology. He’s worked for a wide variety of technology companies in senior positions for many years. Now, through Agentic Communications, which is a web development company that works with progressive organizations […]

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Problematizing Indigenous Aesthetics

In 1966, Sol Worth (professor of Communication from the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania) and John Adair (professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University) set out to find “what kind of visual and temporal style and aesthetics might [the] Navajo use if they were trained […]

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Communication for Social Change

If we had two friends who wished to establish a healthy relationship together, we might give them some basic advice: listen to one another, respect your differences, try to see things from the other person’s perspective, be patient, keep each other informed about important things, include your partner in decision-making, […]

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HCI for the Developing World

President Truman, in his 1949 inaugural address, announced his plan for America to “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” He said that although our material resources for helping humanity were […]

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Book Review: Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar

Escobar’s Encountering Development evolves around the thesis that “the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression.” He approaches this through a discursive analysis of the components and relationships of what he calls “the three axes that define development”: its forms of […]

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ICTs and the Backstretch: an Ethnography

ICTs and the Backstretch: an Ethnography of the Backstretch Employees of the Saratoga Race Track and their use of the Backstretch Global Communications Center As Ellen McHale points out in An Ethnography of the Saratoga Racetrack, “the backstretch of the thoroughbred racetrack at Saratoga Springs, New York, is an ‘intentional’ […]

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