Design Theory
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2025
27:36 · 1.8M views · Jun 30, 2024
A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.
Commenters cite it to explain expert blindness and the difficulty of solving problems from inside your own cultural context.
3 comments from Hacker News
It was this line of thinking which lead to the One Laptop Per Child failure. See "Why do Western Designs fail in Developing Countries" - this video OLPC is discussed from ~9 minutes in, but the whole thing is relevant. OLPC started when Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte went to Senegal to teach people to code, and found that there was no good reason to learn to code if you live in rural Senegal and people were not interested. They decided they knew better and doubled down, making the OLPC project, and when presenting their laptop to the world the African delegation at the conference objected to spending money on laptops instead of infrastructure, schools, water. Negroponte decided the target users didn't know better than him what they needed, so he ignored them. "One of the things people told me is, look Nicholas you can't just give a kid a laptop and walk away. Yes you can". he said. And he did. And almost none of the kids did any coding on the laptops. [LINK]
>If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable. It requires more than funding to solve the problem. Sorry that my source is a YouTube video, but this video explains a general problem (that of trying to solve problems that are more prevalent elsewhere in the world, from within your own cultural context) and gives malaria as an example. People in malaria-afflicted countries, given free insecticide-treated nets, will often try to use them for fishing - not caring about the effect the insecticide will have on the haul. It's not due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, but due to a value judgment: people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem, while poor people (on a global scale - not like in the US where "the poor" can afford some really impressive things) are always concerned with food supply.
> On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context While I share the opinion that the command line is _the one true way_ of computing, I don't think this is really all that true. Computers are alien. GUIs are alien. CLIs are alien. Everything is learned. Everything is experience. Everything is culture. Learning, experience, and culture blind us from the experience of the novice. This is "expert blindness". Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries this video [LINK]