UI for illiterate

Beautiful words from Ranjit Makkuni (Sacred World Foundation):

“In rural communities, villagers may be illiterate with respect to Silicon Valley’s notions of GUI, i.e., button pushing, point and click, but highly sophisticated with respect to hand skills and tactile interfaces. What is the equivalent of GUI in village contexts? What narratives are found in the village in the traditional performing arts of puppetry, theatre, mask dance? How do these narrative forms reflect a traditional society’s perception of time and space? How might these inform the design of non-Windows based GUI?”

“For the emerging developing world, we can’t presumptuously dump “button pushing” and notions of desktops into the paddy fields of India or the forests of Latin America—places where “cut, copy and paste” may not mean anything. These are cultures in which the hand is considered an extremely intelligent tool; their crafts reveal an extremely high degree of hand literacy.”