The human touch

Earlier I had argued for a more inclusive design of digital systems that does not create a huge “digital divide”. This article delves in to a deeper understanding of the underlying causes and appropriate actions.

The other day, I went to the Karnataka Road Transport Office in Bengaluru to apply for my International Driving Permit. Thanks to Parivahan Sewa (https://parivahan.gov.in/), initiative, that the process of applying for driving licences and other services has been digitised and centralised. This is the first time that I heard about this initiative, despite reading through carefully the license requirements on the RTO web site.

First, government e-services are not well communicated to the masses. Unless you do it once, it is most likely that you will miss it.

Second, the government digital services have been designed by techies for techies. I had to do the following manoeuvre, including taking picture of some of the hardcopy documents using my Smartphone, sending them to laptop, compressing them to less than 20 KB limit and uploading them, all the while praying that network connectivity would not be lost. Even for me, it was mind boggling, needless to mention about a common man who applies for licence.

Tech savvy intermediaries

Third, the e-government services have poor user friendly interfaces which necessitates an intermediary to help avail the services, thus defeating one of the objectives of digitisation, namely disintermediation. One could even spot vans around the RTO, having laptop, internet connectivity and printers for serving those hapless citizens needing to apply online. So digitisation has spawned a new set of tech savvy intermediaries.

Fourth, the government officials are of little help in overcoming the problems citizens face. There is no help available to assist citizens in availing digital services.

So in the urgent need to embody digitisation in all aspects, the government seems to have created a huge digital divide. Though digitisation of government services intends to provide transparency, faster response time, auditability amongst others, the human element is missing in the design of such digital services.

Scott Harley in his book “The Fuzzy and the Techie” illustrates through many examples, why innovation as much about human insight as it is about technical development. He also argues why humanities and social sciences should play an equally important role on our digital world as much as Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. He cites Redid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn; Mike Kreiger, co-founder of Instagram; Scott Forestall, the creator of iPhone and iPad; and Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo!, who all graduated with a major in symbolic systems program at Stanford University. This unique programme brings together a course on computing with ones in psychology, logic, linguistics and philosophy! Hence, it is the need of the hour to train those who build digital systems using an inter-disciplinary approach. As India catches up with the rest of the world in furthering its digital economy, we need designers and engineers who can blend the technical fluency with humanities and social sciences so that they can create digital artefacts and systems that are inclusive for all demographics, gender, age, economic and social strata of the society. The technical institutes in the country must shall embrace this integrated approach to educate and train IT engineers.

(The writer is Professor, IIIT-Bangalore.)

COMMENT NOW