Serving the Underserved: What Can Designers Learn From Rural Appraisal Techniques?

In Base of the Pyramid projects products and services are designed for the poorest users. Designers in these projects often have a Western background and the users live in rural areas in non-Western cultures. This poses a challenge of cultural understanding for which several disciplines have developed techniques. This paper presents a comparison of rural appraisal techniques with contextmapping techniques, which results in five guidelines for designers related to (1) the empowerment of people, (2) materials and locations, (3) time, (4) biases and (5) attitude of the outsiders. The developers of rural appraisal techniques emphasize the importance of a bottom up approach in which local people have a leading role in their development. Design approaches are moving in this direction.