I am guilty of thinking that I know how the world works. Oh sure, I might not know everything, but I know many of the general principles and if I need to, can do the research to find out the details. Thing is, I sometimes get blindsided by ideas outside of my discipline, for example there are hugh swaths of psychology, social science, etc. etc. that I have no idea about and these are sometimes very relevant to understanding a situation. I might observe something, but not have a framework to really talk about or understand it. One such idea that comes from psychology is functional fixedness. According to wikipedia, functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. We tend to approach problems through the frameworks and Architects and computer scientists, might use the language of a design pattern. An psychologists and engineers might look at problems in very different ways because they both have a different toolkit for understanding. If they are talking together and shaping each others perceptions, then I think that together they’ll understand what is going on more fully.

In Bangladesh if you need some work done at your house, you’ll call a mistri or tradesman. I think it literally might mean master, as in master of a trade though that sometimes might be a bit optimistic. The mistri will show up barefoot, with a little bag of tools consisting of a saw, a few chisels, a plane, or maybe some trowels if he works with brick, but there will almost be a hatul or hammer. A hammer is the tool of choice for everything. Bangladeshi’s have a penchant to pound. Specialized equipment like motorcycles and bicycles often needs some special wrenches to work on certain parts. However if you don’t have that wrench, a screw driver and hammer tapping at a protruding corner might work. Tools are used to death in Bangladesh and often don’t last as long as I think they should. For physical things don’t there isn’t a sense of permanence. Maybe it’s because things are changing so quickly, or maybe it’s because at the very core Bangladesh is a delta and even the land isn’t permanent. There are very few old ruins in Bangladesh. Other thinking on the other hand seems to change very slowly, for many Bangladeshis, no meal is complete without rice–without it, it’s just a snack. I eat a lot of Bangladeshi food, but when I try to share dishes from other places I’ve lived, it often goes unappreciated. I’ve heard it said by Bangladeshi’s, “your food is not suitable for us.” From my perspective, what Bangladeshi’s consider suitable food, is very limited.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a certain amount of functional fixedness that is required in society. It allows one to make assumptions that form the basis of further development. Without a core foundation of assumptions or design patterns, it is difficult to design or build upon previous work and a project that makes sense when it was started can very quickly become irrelevant when those assumptions become invalid. To compensate, projects either need to be over engineered or restarted and both drastically increase costs. Sustainable technology work is in many ways on the edge. Sustainability implies a very long time, yet we talk about technology as having a lifespan, often very short. Most new technology, either the product or the idea behind it, doesn’t come from Bangladesh, and importing it without adaptation often puts it into conflict with local thinking and structures. When it comes to technology, I understand many ideas that are simply absent in most of Bangladesh, and am often asked to share them, but it’s difficult because often they are premature and simply won’t work here or if they did would require too much time or expense to get working. The idea behind sustainable technology is to bring wisdom rather than just knowledge and that is much more challenging. I’ve had conversations about how tools improperly used soon become noshto or broken and I’ve tried using the phrase. “shudo hatul takle, shop shamosha perekei moto decade” – If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. While I think it’s grammatically correct, all I get is blank stares. I guess the idiom doesn’t translate.

Mobile phones are everywhere in Bangladesh. It’s been so successful here because it fits  well into the culture of gab, aggregates the purchasing power of Bangladeshi’s, and the infrastructure is able to avoid many of the problems pervasive in Bangladesh. Recently I wrote a post about the barriers to information transfer in the developing world and made the point that the current ways of working in the west, particularly mobile devices and bandwidth intensive web apps, aren’t as accessible in the developing world. That was a statement of the current situation, but I’d like to point out a trend. Two years ago I would have said that simple phones are most common, but now I’m not sure. At that time Nokia was the clear winner. It was very clearly the brand to own. The big spenders used expensive Nokia sets which helped Nokia to sell their entry level phones. While proper smart phones are still in distinct minority, the new high-end devices I’m seeing are iPhones and Android devices. There are still a fair amount of mid-range Nokia sets, but Chinese and Indian sets with more functionality are popping up everywhere. The village I live in has mud huts and inconsistent power, but some of  the young men have mobile sets that play music and movies, support multiple sim cards, have bluetooth and are capable of basic internet access.

Last year I had a motorcycle accident and broke my 3rd metacarpal in my right hand.  At the same time my power cable for my laptop went out and getting a warranty claim processed in Bangladesh takes longer than it should. I was without my primary computer, and I couldn’t use a keyboard like I normally did. The biggest single reason I bought an Android device is that it works as a standalone device, and during that time, that functionality served me well. For several weeks, my Nexus One became my primary computer. I used it one handed, and it turned out that for many things I wasn’t really limited. There was a big criticism about tablets was consume content rather than create content. I think has largely faded being I don’t read as much about that anymore.  High end phones are just as capable processing wise as the tablets and maybe a more important question is whether the device functionally complete: is the device able complete a task without physical access to another general purpose computer. While my Nexus One was my primary device, I couldn’t access peripherals such as flash storage and USB devices and I couldn’t develop on the Android for the Android.¹ These issues are basically the same on iOS as well, but the times they are a changing.  Smart phones are becoming increasingly standalone devices.  I’ve now got a Python environment on Android through Scripting Library for Android and the recent announcement of Android ADK is going to allow a plethora of hardware options.  Apple with it’s proprietary connecter offers a good deal of input output options and dongles like camera connection kit allow you to move data on and of a device. Recently I even saw that Oscium makes an oscilloscope/logic analyzer for iOS, which is something I would find useful.

As these phones become functionally complete, they’re going to start replacing computers.  As low end phones gain functionality and processing power, Android is going to start showing up in the developing world.  I wonder if Microsoft realizes how truly irrelevant it is becoming.  Desktops and laptops here run either open source or pirated software, but there are over a billion people who want to buy phones in the Indian subcontinent and another billion in China.  While I don’t think Apple is going to go after the developing world market, I suspect that Apple will continue to transition iOS toward a standalone OS which would position them with the option.² The personal computer of the developing world is a phone made in Shenzhen, and I wonder who’s thinking about that.

1 Not including a linux environment on a rooted handset.
2 My bet for the North Carolina Datacenter.

You’ve probably notice two trends in the developed world. The first is toward web or cloud based software and the second is a move toward mobile devices and content in both cases the trend is toward greater network connectivity. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I haven’t seen anything that compelling in desktop software design recently.  Sure the apps look nicer, but there hasn’t been that much added in terms of daily functionality.  The causes for that which maybe aren’t that important, but the reality is that the paradigm of the desktop is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The interesting things are happening on the web and on mobile devices.  In general I think this is good for consumers, but there are some practical issues when it comes to the developing world. Bangladesh is what I know about, so let’s look there. Practically Bangladesh has one internet connection, Sea-me-we 4 which is an undersea cable and the primary internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe. For a lot of reasons, Bangladesh currently doesn’t have much in the way of content creation and content distribution so all traffic needs to go out of Bangladesh. This means that bandwidth costs are slow and expensive. The result being that I probably didn’t watch the youtube video you emailed me. At the end of the day these issues slow knowledge transfer. Access to knowledge has always been a barrier to development and even in an internet age, the content created in the developed world is still difficult to access in the developing world.