The questions I am trying to answer are as follows-
1. How do we design interfaces for those who can barely read and write?
2. Is education always the answer to overcome the digital divide?
3. Can top-down approaches work, whereby interactive technologies are designed specifically to meet needs of those who are not literate nor economically strong?
4. How different would these interfaces be from those you and I are familiar with?
5. How can the concept of say a job-search application or an ATM be translated to a visual system that allows an illiterate person to interact with, given very little assistance?
6. What cues can we take from the culture of a person's community, while visualizing interfaces for those with special-needs?

My research for COGS 234 with Ed Hutchins strives to answer the first three questions. COGS 220, has given me the opportunity to tackle the last three. The area is very broad and involves plenty of ethnographical study and insight into practises of communities. However I am trying to boil down my understanding to specific groups and specific applications. There are plenty of work going on today, especially targeting the rural population of South Asia. For instance, the Grammteller project in IIT, Chennai used bio-metric fingerprint censors to log-in users to an ATM machine, a slick technology that we in developed nations have still not been able to incorporate into our ATMs! The concept of using "thumb-impression" is very common in rural India, and this analogy is well translated into technology.

This is just one instance of numerous culture-friendly cues to designing user-interfaces. I am really excited to have dived into this area of research. Some of these papers are pretty interesting and offer a bit of an introduction to the area:

1. Bridging or broadening the digital divide: interfacing the experience of learning for the next decade Ben Williamson, Futurelab (Becta website, 2003)
2. Matt Huenerfauth. 2002. Design Approaches for Developing User-Interfaces Accessible to Illiterate Users. Intelligent and Situation-Aware Media and Presentations Workshop. American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2002) Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
3. Marshini Chetty , William Tucker , Edwin Blake, Developing locally relevant software applications for rural areas: a South African example, Proceedings of the 2004 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries, p.239-243, October 04-06, 2004, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa
4. Medhi, I., Pitti, B. and Toyama K. (2005) A Text-Free User Interface for Employment Search Asian Applied Computing Conference (Nepal), December 2005