comparatively better, but either there is none in the
office vicinity or they don’t have delivery services.
Affinity Maps
We used affinity diagramming to synthesize the
findings into specific insights. This helped us identify
the following areas of design intervention: branding,
attracting new customers, ways of providing more
options to the current customer base, better
communication among dabbawalas and customers,
keeping track of expenses. We felt the need to
introduce technology in their business to overcome
their current needs. Some of the young dabbawalas
already use smartphones and hence we decided to use
it as a medium to address their problems. But since
most of them have a strong aversion towards any kind
of technology [10], technology adoption became a
challenging task.
Technology Adoption
Introducing new technology does not bring
development by itself, but merely enables it. Further,
technology needs to be adopted and sustained by their
users before it can enable development [4]. There are
people of all ages among the dabbawalas. The solution
has to be widely adopted by the dabbawala community
for it to sustain [5]. The technology also has to be
reliable and accurate and it should impact the
dabbawala as an individual along with the whole
community for it to be accepted and adopted [3, 5].
Technologies especially the ones that are termed as
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
have traditionally been used for automation, and
specifically office automation. Subsequently, ICTs
started being used in non-work environments, including
homes, public places and for leisure, education, and
socialisation, though their reach was still limited to
urban, office-going, western or westernised, educated,
and globalised users. They are the traditional users of
ICTs.
The prime factors contributing to the human
disadvantage are poverty, illiteracy, social inequity,
poor healthcare and environmental degradation [12] -
issues that ICTs have not dealt with traditionally. Only
within the last decade have ICTs reached beyond the
traditional users and have shown a promise to enable
human development at large by reaching new users,
who may have less education (not reached college),
who may be poor (for example, marginal farmers, very
small business owners, village artisans catering to local
markets), who are often located away from commercial
and political centres, and are culturally different not
only from the traditional (that is, urban and educated)
users but from each other as well [8]. They are the
emergent users of ICTs.
Experience, education and age are important variables
to consider for the emergent adopters. Additional
variables such as prevalence of technology around
them could also play a role in technology adoption.
Further, culturally, the new users are very different
from the traditional users and this may affect their
attitudes and motivations.
We decided to target the young dabbawalas who are
used to smartphones. They may act as early adopters
and slowly make way for the laggards [9].
Figure 6. . Application screen
flow for changing order:
(1-4) Customer places a new
order. (5) Canteen gets
notified. (6) Dabbawala gets
an updated route map.
MobileHCI'15, August 24–27, Copenhagen, Denmark