Beth Kolko

Beth Kolko is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her academic history includes a background in rhetoric, cultural studies, and online communities. She began researching the Internet in the days of newsgroups and Lynx, and at that point focused on how people used the medium to communicate and interact. In 2000, she co-edited Race in Cyberspace which was the result of several years’ research into how issues of race and gender affected technology usage patterns. She then took those research questions to an international context, spending half a year on a Fulbright in Uzbekistan in 2000. She spent ten years tracking the emergence of information and communication technologies in Central Asia since then, and has worked in several other developing regions, including Cambodia, Kenya, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. She runs the Design for Digital Inclusion (DDI) lab at UW. DDI is an outgrowth of studying users in context, looking at information-seeking and communication patterns generally, and examining the ecology of ICTs within users’ lives. Some of the most imaginative uses of mobiles and computers are happening in resource-constrained environments, and DDI is an opportunity to engage with these developments.The DDI group researches diversity and technology from a design perspective, focusing on technology development for resource-constrained environments in order to counteract what could be called a failure of imagination in terms of how devices, software, and services are designed. With the advent of newer, smaller, and cheaper technologies, the user base and use scenarios for information- and communication-centric technologies has expanded to include a broader base of the global population. The DDI lab thinks about the other five billion potential users, about computing beyond the workplace or the desktop, and broadly about technologies that can help address the challenges of everyday life. Central to the lab's work is to demonstrate how technologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars can collaborate on technology-related development and implementation projects. DDI's projects range from designing and developing a portable ultrasound machine for midwives in Uganda, investigating gaming patterns of children in Brazil, to researching the needs of the homeless and other transit-dependent communities in the United States.

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