Design that Matters Field Journal

About Internet Cafes

In the last two weeks, we have become conoisseurs of the African internet cafe. We have learned how to convert keyboards from the French layout back to English. We have learned how to entertain ourselves during the interminable wait for pages to load. We have learned that a gang of kids rushing into the joint to instant message each other pretty much overloads the modem.

Here is the Kinkajou team hard at work.

Here's my typical computer setup. I draft articles and edit photos on my laptop, and then transfer them to the internet cafe machine with a USB compact flash card reader.

Here's a better picture of the card reader. All of the machines here run Windows 98, so I typically have to install the device driver before I can get started. We've been pretty lucky so far in finding at least one machine with USB ports at every cafe.