One World South Asia is an international non-profit working towards democratizing technology. The Lifeline for Education program being managed by One World, intends to provide academic support to teachers in rural schools in India using accessible communication mediums like mobile phones. The system uses simple communication protocols, such as the telephone, laid over an IT and internet-based system. Its design is guided by lessons learned from an existing project that addresses the knowledge needs of farmers.

Quicksand was brought in as the design research team to evaluate the unique aspects of Indian education, including constraints on rural schools, teachers, children, parents and infrastructure. The research in turn led to design recommendations on:

• Suitable collaboration platforms between various stakeholders
• Concepts for content delivery, interaction and system interfaces at each consumer touch point for phase one of program implementation
• A future blueprint of the program with respect to new technology & human interventions
• Internal & external communication necessary for system roll out
• Tweak existing user interface making it relevant for the new context of education

Following are some design & research artifacts from the project.

The program was piloted at district Bardhman, four hours from Calcutta. A week long ethnographic research established some key personas, concerns and paradigms that would govern the design of the Education Helpline. The work consisted of observational studies, in-depth interviews, group discussions as well as photo and film documentation – all aimed at moving towards a richer understanding of the current context.

A short film on teachers sharing their concerns and opinion on the existing education paradigm

Synthesis of the research data led to preliminary identification of user concerns, which provided an indication of the level of complexity that would be demanded of the system. Some key findings are shown below:

The next stage of the study involved developing interaction concepts that were tested with users to establish:

• Program positioning
• Training & Capacity building amongst stakeholders
• Usability of existing interface
• Database management & build-up

SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT: Illustrations of possible scenarios from point of view of teachers, field workers and knowledge workers

CALL FLOW SCHEMATIC: An illustrated depiction of how a call generated travels through the system and the key stakeholders at each stage.

SYSTEM SCOPING: Feature specification of the system in its short, medium and long term manifest

Finally, the Quicksand design team did an audit of the existing web based user interface, navigation and database structure and made simple visual design changes that would enhance its usability. This was important from the point of view of pilot implementation and was used to brief the technology development team.