Ecological interface design and emergent users: Designing for small-scale trucking ecology in India

Effective on-road safety requires proper maintenance of vehicles. In the trucking sector in India, there is a need for supporting predictive maintenance to decrease downtime and improve safety. Improving maintenance in this sector involves certain challenges. First, most trucks are owned by small-scale fleet owners (trucks < 5). Second, maintenance is often handled by small-scale mechanic workshops. The fault diagnosis is very often limited to recognition by the driver and later reassessed by the mechanic by relying on the feel or the sound of the vehicle. Third, a majority of stakeholders in this sector—drivers, mechanics, and owners—have low levels of education. Despite these challenges, with the increase in the rate of digitalization, in the future, it will be easier to monitor the health of the parts of a truck. In addition, there is a developing trend of mobile phone and internet penetration in India that has leapfrogged a majority of Indians into becoming “emergent users” of information technology. Therefore, this article shows that sociotechnical approaches such as ecological interface design can be used to develop mobile interfaces for supporting predictive maintenance through health and usage monitoring of trucks for small-scale fleet owners in India. To develop the interface, a field study was conducted at several sites in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. The insights were used to develop scenarios and the abstraction hierarchy, which were later used creatively to develop the interface design for emergent users.