Our research in rural India for our Mobile Literacy project identified the task of entering and saving a contact information as the single most challenging tasks for non-literate users to perform. Yet it was a task identified as one of the most beneficial aspects of owing a mobile device.

[...] We then began to explore creative ways to make text and numeric information physical. Our question became: How might we make a physical representation of person’s name and phone number?

During our ideation sessions we tossed around a lot of ideas about tokens. When we looked across the mobile landscape, we realized QR codes and the QR code reader applications on many phones would be a viable solution for our text entry problem.