Foreword

Charles Hayes

I have spent the past thirty years making a living by creatively solving other people’s problems. I have had the privilege of reimagining how people work, play, learn, and love. My work has taken me to baseball stadiums in the United States, online dating apps in China, schools in Latin America, and farms in Southeast Asia. In my role as managing director of Asia and global partner at IDEO, I’m constantly trying to make sense of the world around me and connect with others who can shine a light on what the future might bring. Payal Arora is at the top of my list when it comes to making sense of how to navigate many of these potential futures.

Payal and I spent the pandemic years debating and discussing where the world is heading and how we might do our part to shape it. Payal’s critical eye and tuned sensibilities have made an extraordinary contribution to my own worldview and given me courage to solve new problems with new perspectives. Her book The Next Billion Users and its related TED talk not only reinforced all that I had learned from working and living in China for fifteen years but also helped to guide me in my more recent work across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. This book is the necessary companion to the rigorous research and experience shared in The Next Billion Users and is for anyone interested in discovering why the Global South could shape our collective future in ways that could benefit us all.

One of the main challenges I encounter in conversations with Western executives leading global companies is the set of assumptions they make about markets in the Global South. Some see these markets strictly as sources of disproportionate growth given their scale and emerging middle class. Even more alarming are those executives who are waiting for these markets to “catch up” to the sophistication of the Western consumer. Rarer, though, is the executive who has realized the powerful contribution that the Global South can make to their innovation pipeline, their global purpose, or their expanded and pluralistic worldview, and almost absent are those leaders who know how to build thriving businesses that fully realize the market’s creative potential.

This book goes beyond simply highlighting how misunderstood the “world majority” is in the West. Excitingly, it shows us how many of our modern challenges might be best addressed by proactively including the Global South in our digitally powered global future. By infusing our algorithms with the aspirations of the majority world, we can shape a more optimistic future for us all.

However, this book is not a feel good, do good, symbolic appeal; it illustrates a rationally framed reality. The Global South, with its young and ambitious majority, approaches life with a “do more with less” mentality. I see this approach alive and well in Indonesia’s Ministry of Education where they have built a substantive design team, sourcing user experience designers from the high-tech sector who are rethinking digital learning services that will unlock Indonesia’s young population. I recently spent a week in Mexico City with IDEO’s strategic partner Colectivo23, a digital skills academy for Latin America, where we met a wide range of practitioners, students, and creators who are passionately developing the skills required to creatively drive Latin American economies forward. These are the places where intent and action have come together to create tremendous impact under extraordinary constraints.

But these kinds of solutions are not pervasive, nor a given. Payal describes the tensions that reside in trying to tackle some of our most systemic challenges. How can we use centralized control to distribute access to opportunity? Why can’t sustainable practices also stimulate growth? How could more global representation in our data deliver better digital outcomes for all? This book insightfully points out that we are trying to solve these challenges with technology when their root causes are fundamentally cultural.

Cultures Matter

Payal reminds us that culture is messy, contradictory, and not as binary as the algorithms we are so reliant on to increasingly run our world. Biases run deep, access to opportunity is restricted, and a culture of fear seems to have replaced the culture of care we all so desperately need.

We have arrived at that juncture where we must decide between the scarce world of efficiency or the abundant world of creativity. To put it differently, will we pursue a path of least resistance or a path of most resilience? By addressing some of the cultural assumptions we are making about the Global South, we will discover technological win-wins for people and the planet, for the digital and the physical, for the West and the “rest.”

During my fifteen years of living and working in China, I have spent a fair amount of time speaking to creative communities, teaching business and design students, and interviewing promising talent to work at IDEO. I have time and again been impressed with the depth of awareness and understanding of global design trends and solutions these young Chinese designers and strategists have. They are familiar with both successful China-based innovations, business models, and design solutions as well as the equivalent examples and benchmarks from the West, Southeast Asia and India, and Japan and South Korea. This is in stark contrast to most of the young Western designers who have taken what happens in Silicon Valley to be the one and only “global” frame of reference and who are not drawing from the abundant ideas that are emerging in the rest of the world.

As a designer and creative leader, I agree with the book’s framing of many of the challenges of our time as opportunities for responsible design. While highlighting what is problematic about Western tech’s current impact on the Global South, the book offers ways to design social solutions that can benefit all. From drones on African wildlife reserves to music sharing in the Middle East to pornography as education in India, this book provides context and direction for business leaders, digital creators, policymakers, and anyone else looking to realize a better future—a future that both benefits and is benefited by the Global South.

I often say that many tech solutions are answers in search of questions. This book brings us back to the questions that matter and shines a light on the practices that we might use to move forward.

Ask Different Questions

We need to move beyond the paradigm of designing for “good.” Whose good are we claiming? Morality-driven approaches are a misguided way of getting to the best outcomes. Payal proposes a shift from morality-driven to relational-driven design, where we take a step back and try to understand the deeper layers of cause and effect at play, typically of human origin. For instance, when trying to tackle the perpetual problem of the slaughter of endangered animals on African wildlife reserves, Payal questions the focus of investment on ineffective high-tech solutions for tracking animals instead of trying to understand the motivations behind the culture of poaching. Another example given in the book is how the blind censorship of pornography in its broadest definition fails to recognize how it is being used by young people as a surrogate for sex education. Why aren’t we thinking harder about how we could take something that has been weaponized to hurt people and transform it into a tool for empowerment, intimacy, and compassion?

The examples above highlight the importance of taking a critical look at the fundamental questions we should be asking rather than racing to solutions. What are the underlying causes and dynamics at play that may be leading to the problem at hand? I cannot think of a better example than in health care innovation. The tremendous scientific breakthroughs that have created modern Western medicine and medical practice have neglected to integrate the far older wisdom of preventative well-being that comes from traditional Chinese medicine, Indian meditation, or Indigenous ecocentrism. One of my favorite activities when hosting a Western executive from the health care industry in Asia is to get them up at the crack of dawn and spend two to three hours in a park somewhere in China. They will see how the elderly ensure their later years are spent thriving, from dancing sessions to laughing clubs to Tai Chi to community debates—in nature, with others, and actively appreciating the present.

For all of its progress and benefits, the Industrial Revolution also separated us from the earth, compartmentalized our work into measurable productivity units, and put us on a path of mechanized efficiency. Digitization should not accelerate this linear path toward optimization but rather provide a circular rhythm that includes our cultural and environmental roots. By designing solutions imbued with the Indigenous wisdom of ideas like frugality, collectivity, subsistence, and repair, we can deliver healing outcomes that sustain people and the planet. We must shift from the industrialist’s description of data as the new oil to the more careful cultivation of data as the nutrients that fuel a regenerative and thriving ecosystem of interconnected living.

Human Centered

I have long advocated for businesses and systems to be more customer centered and societally inclusive. We must think harder about what human-centered design means and what it must do. We need to celebrate the boldness of human ingenuity while appreciating the humility of being humane. A healthy world is one in which humans are not at the center but are thriving participants enabled by technology and grounded by nature. We must design for the tactile and the intimate, for the earthly and the cosmic, for the multicultural and the interconnected.

I am on board with Payal when she argues for expanding our view on how we design and whom we serve to include the Global South in order to tap into the ambitions and optimism of the world’s majority. This majority has proven time and again that it knows how to do more with less, generate solutions that improve our systems, and possibly steer us toward a renewed vitality in embracing sustainable growth.

Payal points out that it is a moral imperative to design with hope. Some say that designers are natural optimists. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been more excited to join the movement in designing what happens next, with the Global South front and center.