In the summer of 2005, I spent two weeks at a remote village school in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India. Even though I had prior experience in user-centered design, that episode was the first time that I had worked with rural school children as partners in the design process. The goal of this exploratory research was to understand what might be some appropriate e-learning applications that we can design for and with them. To address this goal, I loaned out inexpensive digital cameras to the students, so that they could photograph and tell me more about the everyday scenarios in village life. The rest of the time was spent in engaging students in low-tech and high-tech prototyping activities.

It did not take long before I realized that at least three things were happening that should not have been. Firstly, the twelve children who were pre-selected as my design partners were the “star students” from the school, which implied that I was not working with a representative group of students. Secondly, the children were skipping lunch to participate in the design sessions. Thirdly, they were under the expectation that I was there to teach them something…