IDID, India

Interaction Design & International Development Conference / India HCI

20-24 March 2010, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India

High quality designs increasingly important for users, for industry, and for society across the world. India and the other emerging economies have been designing, implementing, using and exporting interactive software, hardware and systems. These settings bring new challenges for human-computer interaction design – of a wide variety of cultures and languages, of different levels of literacy and education, of new sets of users with different experience, attitudes, expectations and capabilities. They also raise issues of designing technology to support social and economic development for marginalised groups, of designing interactive technologies that are not only affordable by the poor but even those that will help in alleviating poverty.

The other perspective is of industrial practice. On the one hand technology companies in India are process conscious, with many CMMI and ISO certificates. On the other, the HCI research and practice is still maturing. Challenges are many – of limited number of people with the right HCI skills, of low HCI awareness among the development and marketing, of integrating HCI activities in mainstream software development, of limited contact with the end-users, of the need to develop new techniques to suit this context, and of responding to major economic shocks such as the current recession.

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