Inclusion by Design: Requirements Elicitation with Digitally Marginalized Communities

A more equal and sustainable digital future depends on the inclusion of digitally marginalized communities in the socioeconomic opportunities created by digital technologies. Digital inclusion is a complex process that involves all stages of digital innovation, including development, adoption, use, and maintenance. However, past research has largely approached digital inclusion as an adoption and use challenge. In this paper, we develop a view of digital inclusion as a design challenge. We focus on the activities of requirements elicitation (RE) as a critical element of the design process and draw on a design-based interpretive study involving the design of two mobile apps for agricultural communities in India and China. We analyze how the conditions of digital inequality underlying the digital marginalization of these communities affect their sensemaking as they participate in RE activities. We conceptualize these challenges as limitations on the emergence of technology affordances. Our findings reveal various shifts, or translations, in the emerging affordances, which enabled the RE activities to be more generative and consequently more inclusive. These affordance translations manifested along three main dimensions: specificity, temporality, and collectivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for the inclusion of marginalized communities in the design of new technologies.