“I have talked to teams of students designing new de-mining tools without ever having visited a mine field, students designing tools to make charcoal without understanding how poor people improve their incomes by selling the charcoal briquettes they make, and teams of students so convinced that they will create the next revolutionary product and make a fortune doing it that they forget to talk to the customers they are designing for. If these patterns of design arrogance and lack of respect and curiosity about customers and markets become institutionalized in the hundreds of new courses now springing to teach design for the poor, their impacts will be just as trivial as design for the rich.”
- Paul Polak, The Life and Death of Big Institutions
Related posts:
That is very true – though, these students may be just more inspired by the Steve Jobs’ way as analysed by Ken Banks here:
What if Apple worked in ICT4D? Reflections on the possible
http://www.kiwanja.net/blog/2012/01/what-if-apple-worked-in-ict4d-reflections-on-the-possible/
Possibly, but as Ken points out, Jobs’ design philosophy is problematic when it comes to ICT4D. I don’t think Apple could reinvent ICT4D, but at least they’d make it look pretty. And give it a different name, probably iCT4D.
Thanks for the link, though. As always Ken makes excellent points, although that Michael Noer quote at the top made me want to punch the wall, it was so fundamentally stupid. So I did punch the wall, and now my hand hurts.