Today’s software and, more generally, information and communication technologies (ICT), play a growing, integral role in supporting people in virtually every country and of virtually every socio-economic status.  Software and ICT has great potential to improve people’s quality of life. Yet while ICT development is certainly driven by a global market, it is usually designed and engineered by a select few countries. These are generally the developed “western” countries. Thus, software engineering approaches usually have a western focus.  In particular, existing requirements engineering approaches usually reflect how needs can be elicited from people in the developed countries, and ultimately reflect western developers’ perceptions of user needs and what constitutes a “better quality of life”.

Thus, technological hubris often occurs when technological solutions are developed for populations in developing countries and developing regions. Despite being impoverished, these groups constitute the bulk of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) users (although their technologies may not be as sophisticated as ours).  Developers all too often assume these “marginalized” groups (e.g., people who reside in impoverished, underserved communities, developing regions and underdeveloped, non-industrialized nations) have the same needs as the core people in the developed regions and industrialized nations, and they engineer technologies accordingly. Likewise, they typically use the same approaches to elicit requirements and develop technologies for such groups. Both these tactics run the risk of disregarding the true needs of such users by not taking their environment, culture and social order, or influences of either into account. 

Our position is that developers must reconsider current, widely adopted requirements engineering approaches when developing ICT systems for marginalized groups. We advocate embracing alternative techniques from the social sciences, such as cultural probes and storytelling. This project explores how these techniques can be adapted for software and ICT requirements engineering at the margins.

This work was initially started with Ban Al-Ani and Hadar Ziv, along with contributions by Rebecca Maessen.