British industrial designer and user anthropologist Jan Chipchase spent several months last year thinking about how the human race shares things. He’s an exploratory human behavioral field researcher at the Nokia Research Center based in Tokyo. Chipchase tries to help multidisciplinary researchers understand how the world will be in the future.
On Mar. 9, he spoke at the TED conference in Monterey. His talk, which he called “Always On: An Introduction to Design Research for Everyone,” quickly became a hot topic of discussion among conference goers.
BusinessWeek.com Innovation Editor Jessi Hempel sat down with him there to discuss what an anthropologist is doing working for a cell-phone company and how behavioral research feeds into the phone maker’s design strategies.