Learning, innovation, and sustainability among mobile phone repairers in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Residual Mobilities

“…Basic assumptions around infrastructure and development "failures" may reflect the perspectives of northern actors and institutions, and generate new rounds of "development projects" that fail to engage post-colonial conditions and experiences (though they may be good at sustaining the institutional machinery of the development industry). And western-centered assumptions might blind HCI researchers to what"s different about post-colonial computing experience, ignoring sites of action and value -for example, more collaborative forms of technical agency and action [4], or the presence of robust and innovative repair networks [13]that may differ in positive ways from northern computational experience. At the broadest level, HCI work on post-colonial computing has revealed the extent to which core ideas, expectations and assumptions around computing may reflect conditions and experiences specific to the "global North," many of which translate badly or not at all to a wider set of contemporary global realities.…”

“…We found one 40-year-old fish vendor drying his mobile phone in a bucket of rice, for example, who explained: We begin by noting the general absence of Begunbari (or places like it) in the general stories HCI tells about mobility, computing, and the relationships between them. Stories of dispossession -and especially radical forms of dispossession like those experienced by the residents of Begunbari -are largely (though not entirely [13,22,33]) absent from HCI"s general orientation to the world, which has tended to focus on moments of growth and development: the extension of core services and infrastructures, rather than their sudden and radical disruption. Asking what design can bring to such an environment poses interesting and provocative challenges.…”

“…At the same time, research and design efforts may be extended to the infrastructure level to reduce users" detachment from services. Proper maintenance and repair of such systems might require local expert communities to sustain such technologies [13]. Both government and private sources should explore the possibilities of temporary and modular service infrastructures to address short-term needs in the areas of housing, electricity, water, gas, and sewage disposal.…”

“…Forms of innovation attached to the creative appropriation of infrastructure may open new windows of HCI work. Hacking cultures in China [18], and repair cultures in places like Bangladesh [13], Namibia [14,15], and Uganda [11] have already demonstrated distinctive and creative engagements with technologies that depart from Western norms and assumptions. The forms of infrastructural hacking and fixing woven into the everyday life and survival of people in places like Begunbari can further advance this program of work.…”

Un-Crafting

“…The motivations are manifold: we disassemble appliances as a necessary step for repair [6], as means to harvest components [10], as essential part of iterative design or circuit bending [7], or simply driven by a curiosity to uncover a technological mystery [8]. With this studio-workshop, we aim to explore and debate how taking computational things apart yields a potential for design practices.…”