W05: How Culture Enables Technology

The Elephant in the Room: How Culture Enables Technology

In the past decade, India has emerged as a hotspot for tech companies looking to expand, particularly for apps, services and content. As the country edges towards more than a billion users online in this decade, there is still little understanding of how the deep-rooted cultural nuances and diversity interact with technology and its products. Culture often gets villainised as an ‘issue’ or ‘barrier’ instead of being envisioned as a facilitator.

In this workshop I will lead you through examples of invisible cultural norms and beliefs and how they have impacted businesses in tangible ways. Using case studies and covering a wide array of issues from product design to delivery, I hope to bring alive the opportunities rather than simply the challenges of doing business in a market like India.

Some key questions we will explore:

• How do Indian cultural beliefs frame the context in which technology operates?
• How do New to Internet users in India experience the online world?
• How can technology makers begin to integrate a ‘for India’ lens into their products as they enter a highly complex and diverse market?

Who should attend this workshop

Workshop Leader

Gayatri Sapru is an anthropologist who works with businesses to unpack cultural norms and structures that lay the framework for how products, services and innovations are experienced. In the past decade, she has worked across categories like content, tech, wellness and social enterprises to deliver an understanding of people through their own lived experiences. As the new decade dawns, she sees an urgent need to address the gap between businesses and the people they are serving.

She engages with corporates and students alike, through workshops and university courses, and encourages the adoption of anthropological insight into business and marketing practices.