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Are You Part of the Developing World?

By Fredrik Härén
Rammohan Reddy runs an Internet cafe in Hyderabad [© Atul Loke/Panos Pictures]

For the last 30 or so years, the people of the "developing world" have been dreaming about becoming part of the "developed world."

I dream of a world where no one wants to be part of the "developed world." Because the notion of a world that is "developed" is not only a pessimistic and uninspiring view, it is also a dangerous one.

We in the West made a huge mistake when we divided up the countries of the world and defined them as developed and developing. By categorizing ourselves as developed, we have given ourselves an imaginary straitjacket that stops us from creating new and better solutions.

To call yourself "developed" is to call yourself "done." It is to think that you are "finished," to assume that there is almost nothing to improve on; it is to think you have arrived. But we are not done. Not even close.

We do not live in a world that is economically and ecologically sustainable. And there is no country in the world where people are as happy, harmonious and emotionally and physically fit as they could possibly be. So how could we dare say we are done?

I have spent the last five years traveling to more than 20 developing countries, meeting and interviewing hundreds of creative people to understand what they could teach the developed world.

The first thing that people in developed countries can learn from people in developing countries is to be more curious about the world. As one young industrial designer in India put it to me: "I can design a refrigerator for the US market, because I know what Americans have in their refrigerators, but an American cannot design a refrigerator for the Indian market, because they have no clue what we have there."

Her greater knowledge of the world gives this young Indian designer an advantage. When I asked her why there were not so many groundbreaking innovations like the iPhone coming from developing countries, she said: "The iPhone is an expensive luxury product, and we frankly do not have time to produce those kind of vanity products." She then showed me a mobile pay phone that she had designed for the poor Indian rural population. A sturdy phone that was to be used by people who could not read or write, and that was to be sold at a market price of less than US$15.

One of the strongest insights I had while doing interviews with all these creatives in developing countries was the difference in energy between the people in developing countries and the people I meet in developed ones. They are still dreaming of what could be achieved, still full of energy, trying to make it happen. My hope is that these people will not only try to "catch up" with the developed world, but will aim much higher. As a young Turkish designer said to me: "It seems like the West is just busy trying to protect what you have, instead of creating even better solutions."

Understanding the Internet

Nowadays, most Europeans have Internet access and even complain that it is too slow. However, this does not mean that they have begun to use the Internet yet. Those who have really understood the whole point of the Internet are the people in developing countries.

You might hear a young designer in Shanghai talking about his friend who learned fluent Japanese by playing Japanese games online, or perhaps a 28-year-old Chinese woman in Beijing describing how she learned English fluently and then went on to study a free online program in feminism at an American university.

The 29-year-old Internet entrepreneur that I met in Bangalore a few years ago might also give you a hint. I asked him what young Indians did on a Friday night. "I can't speak for anyone else," he replied. "But as far as I'm concerned, I usually read the online version of the Harvard Business Review."

[Fry Design Ltd./Getty Images]

Lim Tit Meng is a manager at the Science Centre Singapore. He described to me viewing a display in Boston which showed in real time where in the world Google was being used most. It was two in the afternoon in Boston, the middle of the night in India and China.

"China and India were alive--like fireworks!" he explained. "They were these two big red blobs. And I thought to myself, 'Oh my god! It's 2:30 in the morning there.' The ability to access the Internet has really opened up everything."

Hikmet Coskun Gunduz at the Department of Computer Science, Istanbul Bilgi University, exemplifies how the Internet has affected people in developing countries. At the moment, he is working on coming up with a quicker way of multiplying: faster integer multiplication.

"Before the Internet, I would have been forced to move to the USA because the world's leading professor in this subject works there," he told me. "Ten years ago, I wouldn't even have had access to his work if I had remained here in Istanbul. Nowadays, though, I can chat with him every day if I feel like it."

He has a mentor in Germany who is teaching him about European research methods, and who has also inspired him to translate Linux manuals into Turkish. In his spare time, Hikmet tries to solve one of the world's 10 most difficult mathematical problems: P=NP or nondeterministic polynomial time.

I think it was Michelangelo who said our biggest worry should not be that we set our goals too high and fail to reach them, but that we set our goals too low and achieve them. The developed world reached its goals and forgot to set bolder ones.

Why is there not a stronger feeling of urgency and determination to make sure that we develop much better ideas and technologies aimed at giving every man, woman and child a better life?

We need much better ideas in all areas. Not just small incremental improvements but huge, innovative leaps in how we create energy, grow our food, distribute our wealth, take care of each other and our environment.

We need innovative leaps in all the important areas of our lives. And the key word here is "important." We are living in a world where business people and politicians are celebrating creativity and innovation and where the speed of change makes it difficult for anyone to even comprehend what is going on. But at what price and to what end? An idea is not good because it is new. Change in itself is not desirable--change and improvement are not the same thing. We need to ask ourselves how our creativity benefits humanity as a whole.

Can we afford to have a huge amount of creative capacity in the developed world that is focused on solving trivial, luxury problems? We urgently need to refocus our creative energies on solving the real, pressing problems of our world.

Humankind has shown over and over in history that when we put our minds to it, we are capable of astonishing achievements. We need the awareness that we are all living in "a developing world." And we should not rest until we have created a world that we are proud of. We can do much better than this. And we must!

Fredrik Härén is the founder of creativity company interesting.org and the author of eight books, including The Idea Book. His latest book is called The Developing World (www.thedevelopingworld.com). He lives in Singapore, Sweden and the Philippines.

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