Made in Burkina

Let¿s suppose that you are part of a design task force sent to a very different context from the one you're familiar with. Let¿s also suppose that you have less than two months to gather useful information on the local cultural and social ground as part of filling a gap created by the imminent deployment of new technology in this context. What would you do? This book describes the technique adopted by a team of the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) in just such a situation. Giovanni Innella, in collaboration with Franco Papeschi, and Valentina Nisi have reached the North of Burkina Faso, a land where technological innovation is about to lead to big changes in services and in society itself. Convincing ourselves of the possibility of a copy-and-paste process between our world and the red planet of Burkina Faso would probably bring us to the misconception of the African country as a ¿backward nation.¿ Instead, developing Countries are places where simple and advanced technologies are plugged in without following the Western chronology. Therefore the same technologies can take on very different connotations; technology and culture always mediate each other, after all.