Karekura

My introduction to “this new field called ICTD” took place on a rainy Saturday evening in January 2006 at a Starbucks on Highway 84, when one Joyojeet Pal — then graduate student at Berkeley — was generous enough to meet with me, a disillusioned software design engineer at Microsoft. He gave me a quick primer…

Can women do mobile phone repair?

Thank you, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, for sharing your story.

June 15, 2013
Akmal’s Mobile Phone Repairing Training Center
Nahar Plaza, Elephant Road, Dhaka (Bangladesh)

Breaking Silence

Thank you, Nova Ahmed, for your story!

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Apu (sister), will you write my story on your computer?

It was the girl who works at my mother’s house. She was harassed in her village, left school and got married, which did…

Aspiration

Thank you, Joyojeet Pal, for sharing your story.

Somewhere around the end of my Ph.D. field work in the winter of 2007, I was working in rural districts surrounding Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. I would meet children in schools to observe their use of computers. Some of these observations…

Unexpected Events

Thank you, Susan Dray, for sharing your story!

Doing research in another country is always interesting and challenging. Doing research in shanty towns, slums, informal settlements or townships (as they are called in South Africa) adds another dimension of both interest…

Newborn care in Dodoma

Thank you, Neal Lesh, for your story.

One story that has stuck with me over the years (so you may have heard it from me before) is from when we tried to introduce newborn care information in Dodoma, Tanzania. Dimagi had equipped about 35 community health workers…

HCI Abroad: Distance Changes Everything

Thank you Anjuli Dasika, Jackie Wolf, and Nick Reid for sharing your story.

Prior to arriving in India for the University of Michigan’s Global Information Engagement Program, our team — a UX designer, public health specialist, and…

Fieldwork Challenges in the PartoPen Project

Thank you, Heather Underwood, for sharing your story.

The problems we attempt to solve as ICTD researchers never exist in isolation. It is this complexity and vast possibility that make this field incredibly diverse…