Nations Building

	Pentland human centered designs make technology accesible to all people.

But using better technology where technology already exists isn't the hard part. Bringing technology to improve business, education and healthcare in parts of the world where most people have never used a telephone is. As a co-founder of the Digital Nations Consortium, Pentland aims to use his human-centered technology to do just that.

Bringing telecommunications to a rural village once meant building-and paying for-costly infrastructure: miles of copper wiring and telephone poles.

"And what that means," says Pentland, " is in poor parts of the world, you just don't get telephones-or you get one telephone in the center of the village if you're lucky. Wireless technologies are allowing us to get digital connections at a price that's actually cheaper and more reliable than running that copper line."

As part of his "Unwiring the World" project, Pentland is working to establish inexpensive "digital town centers" in Costa Rica. The centers' digital satellite links would give even the poorest Costa Ricans access to banking, medical and academic information. In India, Pentland and his students Nathan Eagle, Sergio Delgado, Amir Hasson and Prabhat Sinha collaborated with Indian businessmen to bring wireless handheld devices to rural Indian villages. According to Pentland, improved standards of living naturally follow improved connections.

	If technology can supports us as social animals-it will be immensely popular all over the world says Pentland.

"The one relationship that's most studied and most valid in all of development is that if you put in more communications, you get increase in income. It always works," he says. "When you put in more communications, everybody can begin arranging their business a little bit better, finding out about market prices and knowing when the bus is gonna show up."

In keeping with his human-centered design philosophy, Pentland isn't interested in just dropping a cell phone off in a rural village in India. He's interested in designing wireless communications devices that will fit seamlessly into the lives of the people there and give them access to the information they need in a format they can understand. For instance, 65% of India's 1 billion citizens cannot read.

"We have a very particular take on language interfaces, which supports dialects," says Pentland. "It's radically different than the normal approach, which says everybody has to speak the same way. Our approach is based on the assumption that everybody has their own dialect."

In turn, designing technology that serves the rural Indian can have repercussions here at home, too, says Pentland.

"If you can make something for illiterate people who speak an unusual dialect in the middle of India, then you can make wireless technology for an elder who's a little scared of technology or a young kid who doesn't read yet."

images: MIT Media Lab
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