Pulled Rickshaw

The rickshaw came to be the most popular form of transportation in Hanoi and Saigon from the 1910s through the mid 1930s. As these cities developed and grew rapidly, and as French Indochina was integrated into the world economy, rickshaws met an increasing demand for accessible, convenient, and efficient modes of transportation. The rickshaw trade provides an example of European colonizers adopting an “Asian” form of transportation, a hybrid between a sedan chair and Western-style wheels, put into motion using cheap Asian labor. The emergence of a Vietnamese middle class ensured customers for public rickshaws. For much of the urban population as well as a portion of the rural population, rickshaws became an indispensable and integral part of daily life. This essay explores how the circulation of rickshaws gave rise to issues of hygiene, safety, traffic control, taxation, convenience, comfort, aesthetics, accessibility, uses of public space, labor disputes, and ethics.

Technological advancement and evolution of machinery is representative of human capabilities and progress signifying amelioration of human conditions. This has led to increased human control on the environment by the use of these instruments of production by increasing the range and preciseness of response. (Kumar, Rajesh; Agarwala, Arun; Instrument Design and Development Centre, Indian institute of Technology, Delhi, 2014) It is in the property and nature of machineries and the analogy of technical advancement that the achievement of man’s control over the machinery need not be limited only to its immediate operant. This aspect is being exploited by the capitalist modes of production and utilized to the maximum.
Economic fashioning of technology is nothing but social shaping of technology. This is parallel to the Marxist model of economic fashioning where economic calculations and ‘laws’ are very particular and specific to various models and structures of society and not universal. Technological advancement and progression is very much characterized by regional variations, geographical attributes and cultural pointers and these factors highly contribute to the design essence and orientation of a product. Various cities have various rickshaw designs. The rickshaws of Calcutta and Delhi vary greatly in their design and aesthetic looks which is in coherence with the geographic, economic, social, cultural, political and environmental model particular to the city. Every society has to identify their costs and interests in respect to design selection and technical choices and thus the forms and patterns of that choice made is always fluctuating.
As technological advancement defined and redefined the goals of innovation with the progress of time, a wider acceptance of these progressive scientific ideas and models became fundamental and prerequisite for achieving these goals. Terms, phrases and theories like ‘scientific belief system’, ‘scientific temper’, ‘scientific method’ and ‘broader scientific outlook’ reverberated through the innovative design application and evolution of the rickshaw over the period of its existence.

Making technology accessible to low literate users and communities is an important challenge of ICTD research and practice. Past work in the field has addressed the problem of effective UI (User Interface) design under low literacy conditions, exploring graphic or audio alternatives to text-centered interfaces on the basis of studies that take individual users and user-interface interactions as their central unit of analysis. Our study complements this work through an alternative 'ecological' model, in which literacy-based barriers to technology use are encountered not by individual users but embedded social actors who draw on external networks, resources, and infrastructures to manage the problems that literacy poses. Based on a six month ethnographic study of mobile phone use within a low-literate rickshawpuller community in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we explore the literacy-based barriers to use experienced by our study population, and the external networks and connections that users draw on to work around such barriers. We conclude with design and wider research recommendations that may expand the toolkit of researchers seeking to better address these and other ICTD problems.