 Hello everybody. It's a great pleasure to be able to talk to you here today And you may wonder what a British guy is doing here in India at a women in design track Urging you to focus your UX work on village women in India So hopefully this short talk is going to make it clear But personally I always feel that life has got a strong sense of irony and so that I find myself here It just is another another moment of humor of life But mainly I want to talk about this amazing world of UX which is right on your doorsteps And what I'm proposing to you is that if you engage with it fully you will become a UX genius. I Used to be a senior design researcher at Microsoft where I got to work on some large fun projects I was the design research lead for the connected car project. I worked on MSN a bit of Microsoft comm homepage The massive B2B websites for the Microsoft partner ecosystem and even a little bit on HoloLens But then I took a sabbatical. I'm more or less retired. I was kind of done in somewhat the rat race of UX I've really enjoyed my time at Microsoft and my time in the field But there's a certain point at which you're pushing further and further and you have to stop and step back and goes What are the products? What are the projects that mean the most to me? We all have only a limited amount of time on our hands What's the projects then I ask you that are gonna make you feel the most fulfilled? It may well be Comfort tech technology to make comfortable people even more comfortable It may be technology to help businesses be more efficient, you know, even a 1% increase in the efficiency of Bug prediction in software can save millions of gallons of fuel a year. There's real value there There's a lot of different projects you could be working on and you're at a critical moment I say here UX in India where's when you set the vision for what UX is about Are you going to be following Hollywood and Silicon Valley? Always that kind of maybe one or two steps behind playing catch up. That's definitely one option But you have another option right on your door and this is something which lured me To India because now I work and teach here at Dumbarton University in Kerala as part of Amici Labs Amici Labs is a multidisciplinary research and development group that focuses mostly on technology for women's empowerment projects We have designed technology to help skills training But more than that the team is part of an organization would actually takes it to the villages in this picture We see our van one of our vans which goes where other teams can't go to make technology work for sustainability You really have to have boots on the ground You can't throw technology at difficult social situations and expect it to get better You have to take it there. You have to work very Sensitively to see how it's going to fit into people's lives The ecosystem of Indian villages as I'm sure many of you know is extremely fragile and yet I'm told it's the foundation of India. It needs people in the field making the technology work for it to be successful so when the team goes there they like to roll their sleeves up and do some hands-on work and Here's an example of the sorts of things that we work on in terms of cutting-edge tech Many women already work as day laborers getting day laborer rates with a bit of training They can get a certificate from the government that they are Formally plumbers or masons. They make twice as much money and have a lot more status than in the family and in the community and it's been quite well proven that increasing the availability the Resources of women in the family has a net positive effect on the village and the community as a whole What you're looking at here is a force feedback haptic device which helps skills training for soaring pipes If you want to be a plumber or a mason you've got to sort PVC pipes metal pipes different kinds of pipes now You can do this well if you get the hang of how you put your body on your shoulder behind it How you align your eye along the blade? We found that women felt much more comfortable with this intermediary step of training rather than picking up the heavy Tools to begin with so this is an example of the type of innovation that came out of Amici labs By focusing on the needs of village women No where else in the world uses haptic training for this most other applications of haptic training of a very Affluent first world issues like complicated surgeries or NASA training This technology though was used in the opposite end of the spectrum in rural villages out in the back of beyond in India For me, I find this incredibly beautiful and that's why I'm here So in these villages there may be TV But there's often no toilets and a lack of toilets Open defecation Has problems it has problems for health when it leeches into water sources It has problems for women's sexual safety many assaults can happen at the times of day where women go Are able to use a toilet which is often before dawn So toilet building and training women to build toilets is part of the skills training We've been using technology for there's a lot of aspects to this It's very hands-on and there's also some theoretical components and Amici labs has been working on how do you help women learn to build toilets But beyond that, how do you train women to become plumbers? This was a really fun project that it happened before I joined. I'm just a new boy here in the team But we were able to graduate India's first women plumbers Now I find it hard to imagine that you really could have India's first women plumbers, but I'm told yes They really were India's first women plumbers Yeah, it's for the women right We also tried tablet-based learning in various forms. We teach soft skills. We teach Vocational skills and skills for living now in terms of some of the life skills There's a lot of abuse of women that happens because women are not told their government entitlements They are not told what their various property rights are With access to that information, they're able to make more informed decisions Which again makes an enormous difference not just for the women's life, but for the family in the community's life Vocational skills include sewing Artificial jewelry making soap making and one of the from projects We did with our collaborators resulted in a Kickstarter campaign where the women were able to raise a lot of money by selling their Really rather cute crafts But it's not easy to do educational technology in a village I started my career as a research fellow in educational technology at the uk open university back in the day Mentioning under a wonderful woman josey taylor and agnes kakalska home If you're trying to teach people something, it's one thing if we have this nice room, which is more or less free of distractions Imagine if you had a bunch of your kids were running around this room right now as well And a bunch of old men were kind of coming over and looking over your shoulders and peering into your face and seeing what you're up to And maybe some of your husbands Were floating by maybe half of them drunk too There's a lot of distraction in that type of environment It is hard to make educational technology work in a village where the family is a constant presence Also, you don't have a regular classroom hours. You can come and get into a rhythm of learning your life is Based on an agricultural timetable and at certain parts of the year you're all day long is spent in the fields Amazing challenge Is that how do you design a ui for people who can't read or have very low literacy? Yeah, this is the case with a lot of A lot of our users it creates the need to be very inventive in how you work that Additionally, the low digital literacy is the problem because For us we can find facts as soon as we like with our cell phones with our smartphones But again when you're talking about government entitlements Prices fair prices for your products the ability to pick up a smartphone and use it effectively makes a massive difference in these women's lives We're also talking about a very intense cultural and religious Settings now of cross India the village is very enormously in the culture and religion as you know better than I But in almost all places it is something held It's a value system and a reality tunnel which is held very intensively and is probably intensely different to a Highly educated urbanites probably like most of us have in our lives This again makes for a unique challenge for doing ux in this context So it's against that background that I'm going to propose six reasons how you will become a genius If you focus your ux on this secret cutting edge that you have on your back door doing ux for rural village women here in India Firstly there is a real need This is not comfort tech to make the comfortable more comfortable. There's 500 million Indians lacking basic education The 21st century requires different survival skills, which these people need Women and children continue to be a highly vulnerable and highly underserved Now going back to dan's talk his opening keynote yesterday He pointed out go find big ux challenges and you've heard other people saying you know go out find big ux challenges Please if somebody could find a larger ux challenge than this come tell me I had a chance to mentor under irony lund when I was at microsoft He's a wonderful ux leader as the field overall He's now one of the ux heads at ge And his advice to me was always alexander if you want to get promoted you have to go find and solve the big problems And that's what i'm putting to you if you want to get promoted If you want your career to really go somewhere not because necessarily somebody's going to overtly reward you But because life itself is going to lift you up find the big challenges, please You don't have to play catch up with silicon valley or this kind of goofy technology which emerges out of The consumer electronics show there's a lot more interesting challenges to work on And so the first aspect of genius i'm proposing to you is that you identify where the cutting edge really is Identify where the large problems really are There is intense constraints low literacy high distraction environments a fragile social situation Create constraints breed creativity and you have this wonderful concept of jugaad in india of being able to do more with less So this is already a strength of the community here But I put it to you if you want navy seals level skills or magaiva level skills Or just to hone your ability to find ingenious solutions Then again the intense multifaceted constraints of doing ux work for rural india Offers you that opportunity to develop that kind of genius to find innovative solutions to hard problems But more importantly than that It's not that you would just get good at doing ux for village works The types of innovations that you would find by doing ux work for villages are going to be applicable more broadly Right the types of solutions you can find there are the sorts of things which can go global This may be a subtle point, but i'm sure at least half of you have got it There are major cultural differences a complex social structure very different value system And frankly a frequent exposure to intense human suffering Empathy as in chloe's wonderful workshop earlier today Empathy is something you get to develop compassion Insight now we all know what it is when work drives us to be hard hearted We all have colleagues who seem to have turned a corner and rather given up on growing as humans with a soft warm juicy heart Somehow they may be very successful, but they become hard too hard around the edges Whereas life somehow invites us to become beautiful by being very beautifully hearted in what we do And this relationship with people from such a different culture With such a different life experience is an opportunity to develop that genius And so you see i'm not talking about genius in the sense of being able to solve a rubik's cube in one second Or do maths problems in your head For me a genius is much about intellect intelligence, but also emotional intelligence Tell me if you can find a problem, which will help you develop more emotional intelligence in this Let me know And of course they will teach you People have been reminding me that steve jobs said you learn intuition by going to india Certainly as i've come in now a salio member of an indian university i've discovered there's a different way of planning things Which happens in india, which i'm told is called intuitive i'm just flowing with allen But you will learn different life skills different perspectives practical knowledge Ancient knowledge and a sense of resilience from your relationship with these women It will change you you will grow And even more than that you have to put it all together This isn't just one type of project where it's there's some very hard little bit of the user base to figure out or some technology project Or some bit of the business, which is really stuck. This is a difficult problem. It's not for everybody here If you just want to grow and You know come up with some cool tech That's probably what you should stick with if you want a hard challenge We have to bring everything you have to it your intelligence your heart your head your effort your sweat This is something that'll help you grow But more than that You have to step beyond your class you have to step beyond your gender You have to step beyond your ethnicity and your culture You have to build relationships based basically on love With a sense of service You're not going out there to be the great hero or the great leader You'd be going out there to be a servant The world has enough leaders everybody wants to be a leader everybody wants to be a ux leader How about some ux servants? Who are you going to serve with your ux? What's the most beautiful service you could put yourself into through your own beautiful ux work Stepping beyond ourselves this way touches into something which is Precious precious precious in Indian cultural heritage this sense of transcendence The sense of being greater than one's culture one's ethnicity one's gender and so forth Touching into what it really means to be a one-world family touching into something Authentically transcendent about yourself Now I proposed you if you could do that and all of the other both the points I would certainly call you a genius so If you're interested in this come find me There's opportunities to get involved through amici labs just visiting field visits volunteering internships m-tech programs phd programs And if you have what it takes research and teaching If you just want to say hi, please come find me afterwards. It'll be a real pleasure talking to you Thank you very much