oung, tech-savvy South Koreans are making coupon clipping a thing of the past and turning to their mobile phones instead.

Some of the fastest-growing mobile phone services in the country let retailers send discount coupons and users send gift certificates for anything from lattes to movie tickets through their handsets.

The merchandise vouchers have a barcode embedded in the message. Users show the coupon on the screen and retailers scan the barcode to apply the discount. […]

SK Telecom rolled out a service a little more than a year ago called a “gifticon” that allows users to send gift vouchers for items such as convenience store merchandise and pizzas via mobile phones. The sender is billed for the cost of the goods.

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Compiled by Niti Bhan and David Tait (of the Emerging Futures Lab), EMweekly will focus on a wide ranging selection of news, links and articles as well as analysis and indepth stories from the developing world. You can also receive the EMweekly via rss or email.

 
EMweekly /1
 

The Indian Railways plans to tap some 100,000 recharge vendors and mobile phone service providers spread across India to offer cellphone ticketing, in what appears to be an interim step before allowing direct billing via individual cellphones.
 

Booming mobile services in India. “Why is demand for such services particularly great in India? For starters, there are just 30 million PCs in the country, so e-commerce on the Internet still has a long way to go. Cell phones, on the other hand, are becoming pervasive. Nearly 300 million Indians now have phones - making it the No. 2 mobile market on earth - and some 8 million new subscribers sign up every month. These young, mobile-savvy folks have high aspirations but are underserved in everything from banking to entertainment. Getting to them via their cell phones is the best way to provide much-needed and valued services.”
 

IBM has seen some of the writing on the wall. It knows that mobile phones are replacing PCs at more and more tasks at a greater rate each day. In recognition of that, a new IBM Research program will entail a number of efforts to bring services to the millions of people in the world who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing technology, and are instead using their mobile phone to access the Web, conduct financial transactions, entertain themselves, shop, and more. IBM’s research facilities in India will be spearheading the work on these new mobile programs, but IBM said seven other global sites also will be working on the projects.
 

Today, there was news that the apex bank–the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)–is in the process of formulating guidelines for a payment system using mobile phones. RBI is in discussions with banks, service providers and industry bodies to develop the payment system.

“The rapid expansion of this mode of communication has thrown up a new delivery channel for banks,” RBI said in the policy statement. The apex bank plans to post the draft guidelines for this payment system on its Web site by Jun. 15.
 

The buzz around cellphones has suddenly gone missing. Inflation is taking a toll on sales of mobile phones, and this has sent both manufacturers and retailers into a tizzy. Not only have the launch of new products been postponed, retailers are not even in the mood to stock new products. Retailers say that the demand for cell phones has dropped dramatically in the past one month. […]

However, the low-end cell phones are not affected as badly as their high-end counterparts because people who have to buy a new cell phone are lowering their budget and going for basic models,” said a senior executive with a mobile company.
 

Infrastructural updates and increased focus on rural penetration likely in the near future. “The India & South Asia Com congress in Mumbai, after two days of discussions and experience-sharing on the strategies to grow the region’s telecommunications market. […] The overall feeling from the speakers was that the potential for growth is great in the region, provided the stakeholders can take advantage of the opportunities offered by rural telecommunications, 3G networks and value added services.”
 

In a bid to gain quicker foothold into the rural areas, Bharti Airtel has formed a join venture company with IFFCO, which will offer customised mobile services to a target base of 55 million farmers across the country.Under this venture, Airtel has created a value added platform to offer free daily voice updates in local languages on mandi prices, farming techniques, weather forecasts and fertiliser availability to the farmers. In addition, the farmer will be able to call a dedicated helpline, manned by experts from various fields, to get answers to their specific queries.
 

Recently Experientia extended its services with qualitative user research and experience design capabilities in emerging consumer markets in developing nations such as in Sub Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia etc.

This new offering is founded upon a recent structural collaboration between Experientia and three emerging market specialists — Niti Bhan (based in Singapore), Claude Martin (based in France), and David Tait (based in South Africa) — and an extensive research project in Africa we just completed for a major technology company.

“China Mobile, Softbank and Vodafone have agreed to establish a Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) to promote the development of new mobile technologies, applications and services. The three companies expect the initiative will help to accelerate the commercial deployment of mobile internet services.

The three companies will use the JIL as a platform to develop mobile services and drive innovation and synergy in the industry to the benefit of their combined global customer base. The JIL will launch projects based on emerging technologies and market demand.

The JIL will focus on the rapidly growing areas of mobile internet services, such as mobile widgets. Initially, the JIL plans to develop a platform for mobile widgets to encourage the development of innovative new services that can leverage mobile operators’ unique capabilities.

This move is expected to enable different widgets and applications to run seamlessly on different handset platforms and operating systems across different mobile operators, while safeguarding customer security, data privacy and billing systems. The development of a widget platform is expected to benefit both developers and users. The JIL also welcomes the co-operation of vendors and developers in the creation of new applications and services.”

Marc Laperrouza (of LIFT) comments:

“So is this the signal that the two operators are finally coming out of the woods and prepared to use their huge subscriber base to drive the future of the mobile industry? For sure, cooperation will be useful to speed the roll-out of mobile internet services. It will also allow them to better face the upcoming battle with Google and Yahoo - who are also keen to occupy the mobile space. It is also interesting for China Mobile - and China in general - since it will be one of the first attempt to approach standardization in a bottom-up fashion - from the market - rather than top-down - from the government. We may be witnessing China Mobile’s first steps into becoming a global mobile operator…”

It is the fourth issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here).

Three-in-One user study for focused collaboration
by Turkka Kalervo Keinonen, Vesa Jääskö and Tuuli Mattelmäki
This article introduces a human-centered design approach, the Three-in-One User Study, which applies a set of methods to speed up and focus on the design process. With a Three-in-One, designers’ face-to-face contacts with users are concentrated into one collaborative designer-user session where preproduced self-documentation material and early design models enable focused collaborative exploration. Three-in-One combines three different complementary points of view to design: users’ subjective interpretations, designers’ focused observations, and design interventions with models. Three-in-One was applied in a kick-bike design case, and it led to improvements to the initial concept, as well as justified decisions for further design development.

The product ecology: understanding social product use and supporting design culture
by Jodi Forlizzi
The field of interaction design has broadened its focus from issues surrounding one person interacting with one system to how systems are socially and culturally situated among groups of people. To understand the situations surrounding product use interaction design researchers have turned to qualitative, ethnographic research methods. However, stripped from underlying theory, these methods can be prescriptive at best. This paper introduces Product Ecology as a theoretical design framework to describe how products evoke social behavior, to provide a roadmap for choosing appropriate qualitative research methods and to extend design culture within HCI by allowing for flexible, design-centered research planning and opportunity-seeking. This product-centered framework is illustrated as a method for selecting a set of design research methods and for working with other research approaches that study people in naturalistic settings.

Design, risk and new product development in five small creative companies
by Robert N. Jerrard, Nick Barnes and Adele Reid
Five small creative companies were studied in detail over extended periods of the New Product Development (NPD) lifecycle. Design was a key aspect of company activity and central to the NPD process. Novel risk-tracking participatory methodologies were developed and employed to identify perceived risks at the outset of NPD and to track risk thereafter. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken on regular basis with company personnel responsible for design to provide rich contextual material. Results showed a wide diversity of perceived risk with little commonality amongst the companies – despite shared core criteria amongst the firms themselves, and the new products that were tracked. Implications for the sampled companies, and wider policy in respect of business support strategy, are considered.

How to rate 100 visual stimuli efficiently
by Yaliang Chuang and Lin-Lin Chen
Perceptual mapping is a method often employed in design and marketing as a means for visualizing consumer perceptions of product alternatives on the market. Perceptual maps can be computed from two types of data, from attribute ratings or from similarity judgments. In this paper, two computer-based methods are proposed for obtaining attribute rating data, based on multiple attribute scales, for a large number of visual stimuli: The hierarchical sorting method was developed from a strategy commonly employed in paper-and-pencil surveys, whereas the divide-and-conquer method was developed from a strategy often utilized in (computer) sorting of algorithms. In tests that used 100 armchairs as stimuli, it was found that both methods received high scores for simplicity and overall satisfaction in subjective evaluations by the participants. The evaluations, however, also showed that each method had its own advantages. While the divide-and-conquer method produced equivalent results in a significantly less amount of time than the hierarchical sorting method, the hierarchical sorting method was considered to have a higher likelihood of expressing actual opinions than the divide-and-conquer method, due to the fact that a participant using the sorting method could focus on the details of the stimuli after they had been grouped by similarity at the initial stage.

Perceptual information for user-product interaction: using vacuum cleaner as example
by Li-Hao Chen and Chang-Franw Lee
The purpose of this study is to identify which product designs for parts and directions are most effective, and then propose how perceptional information could best be designed to facilitate user-product interaction. Three categories of perceptional information for product operational tasks were proposed in this study. Task analysis and usability evaluations were carried out to analyze what information users required while they practiced the operational tasks. Finally, a primary model was proposed that revealed and defined specific types of entities and different perceptual information— Behavioural Information (BI), Assemblage Information (AI), and Conventional Information (CI)— to be significant elements for the model. Information for specific applications that is available for various types of vacuum cleaner parts is described below: 1) for specific operational tasks, these applications for operability, functionality and operational directions are required for the user-part category, and BI and CI provide effective support for the applications; 2) the application for assembly-ability is required for the part-part category, and AI and CI provide effective support for this application; and 3) the applications for operability, functionality, operational directions, and assembly-ability are required for the user-part-part category. BI and CI provide effective support for the applications for operability, functionality, whereas operational directions, and AI and CI provide effective support for the application for assembly-ability.

The nature of design practice and implications for interaction design research
by Erik Stolterman
The focus of this paper is interaction design research aimed at supporting interaction design practice. The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice. Based on a comparison between the notion of complexity in science and in design, it is argued that science is not the best place to look for approaches and methods on how to approach design complexity. Instead, the case is made that any attempt by interaction design research to produce outcomes aimed at supporting design practice must be grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of design practice. Such an understanding can be developed into a well-grounded and rich set of rigorous and disciplined design methods and techniques, appropriate to the needs and desires of practicing designers.

A growing group of Indian consumers who want more from their phone than just talk time. […] Indians spent some $250 million on extra services for their mobile phones last year—including text messaging, music, wallpaper for phone screens, cricket scores, games, and Web surfing—and that number is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2010.

Why is demand for such services particularly great in India? For starters, there are just 30 million PCs in the country, so e-commerce on the Internet still has a long way to go. Cell phones, on the other hand, are becoming pervasive. Nearly 300 million Indians now have phones—making it the No. 2 mobile market on earth—and some 8 million new subscribers sign up every month.

These young, mobile-savvy folks have high aspirations but are underserved in everything from banking to entertainment. Getting to them via their cell phones is the best way to provide much-needed and valued services.

Read full story

Focus groups were conducted in order to obtain insights into the usability practice of each country. The results provide good indication of the usability knowledge shared and used in each of the studied national markets. Two levels of distinction regarding results can be made for processes and methods: One is results across countries – that is differences in processes and methods between China, Germany and the UK. The other one is results across domains within countries – that is differences between usability engineering (UE) and cross-cultural usability engineering (XUE) processes and methods for each country.

The major findings can be summarized that differences in methods and processes applied differed more between China, Germany and England than for the different domains of UE and XUE. UE-processes in England and Germany seemed more mature, flexible and integrated than in China. Specific processes for cross-cultural product development seem to be not existent. Neither is specific cross-cultural usability-methods applied by any team.

This white paper describes the objectives, methodology and results of the study. It is hoped that the findings presented in this paper will inform the development of usability practices better adjusted to the local realities of each of the participant countries.

Part I | Part II | Part III

“From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.” […]

“The mobile phone is the way social cohesion is taking place. It tightens the bonds between us,” says Ling, an American who researches the social consequences of mobile telephony for Telenor, the Oslo-based global phone company. […]

“The cellphone allows us to create that local sphere” that was the hallmark of pre-industrial villages, says Ling. Cellphone circles tend to be small and full of people who “know what you’re up to, who you are, what’s in your refrigerator. That’s a way of being attached to society. It has a socializing effect.”

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Nokia 2600 classic for personalisation

The Nokia 2600 classic allows consumers to customize their phone with colourful, fully changeable Xpress-on covers and MP3 ring tones, and also features a number of entertainment features, including an FM radio and a VGA camera.

“While cost sensitivity is an important element in creating mobile devices for emerging markets, the overwhelming feedback we receive from consumers in these markets is that they want their mobile device to complement their personality and offer a range of colours and entertainment features,” says Alex Lambeek, Vice President, Entry Devices, Nokia.

Nokia 1209 for phone sharing

According to a recent Nokia survey of consumers in emerging markets [conducted in India, China, Brazil, Pakistan, Vietnam, Russia and Egypt], a new trend appears to be emerging: phone sharing. More than 50% of respondents in India, Pakistan and nearly 30% in Vietnam indicate that they share, or would share, their mobile phone with family or friends - a figure which contrasts consumer behaviour in more mature markets.

“Phone sharing is a logical trend - more and more families are purchasing a mobile phone for the entire family to use, not just the head of the household. In addition, digital cameras are quickly becoming more popular in these markets, and as such taking and sharing digital images is becoming more common,” adds Lambeek. “In response, Nokia has developed a number of innovative features like the multiple phonebook to support phone sharing, and we have added technologies like Bluetooth to some models to make transferring images and ringtones easy and affordable.”

The second model introduced today, the Nokia 1209, offers additional cost management features to make phone sharing easy and convenient. Innovations include the pre-paid tracker, a cost-tracking application, and the multiple phonebook - which allows up to five people to store personal contact lists of up to two hundred numbers on a single phone.

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Nokia now also has a dedicated website devoted to user research and phone designs for emerging markets, with PDF downloads and video material.

The summary was originally published in Italian on the website of the Italian innovation supplement Nova by Prof. Luca Chittaro.

Today Chittaro published the second part of his summary, which you find translated below:

“The second part of the talk dealt with a number of specific user experience design issues that Chang considers crucial in our relation with future electronic devices, be they mobile or not:

• Content portability. Users who buy or own digital content (photographs, songs, videos, etc.) have to be able to move these contents between the various electronic devices they own (TV, MP3 player, computer, telephone, home stereo, etc.) At the moment users are - incorrectly - assumed to delve themselves into complex technical issues and to burden themselves with the translation and the transfer of contents between various devices. Even worse is when companies are deliberately trying to limit the portability of contents, by restricting them to a specific platform. The industry should however aim to create integration between products: e.g. when I have a song on a USB key or on an MP3 player, I should be able to listen to it also on my computer, my phone, my home stereo, without having to buy other things, to master technical issues regarding formats and conversions, or to carry out complex actions that make me waist time. This topic is strongly connected with the new concept of migratory interfaces.
   
• Adaptability of the interface, to allow for a personalisation of the experience. Here he shows the example of Samsung’s uGo interface for mobile phones (developed jointly with Adobe), an adaptive user interface that automatically responds to the user’s environments. The main screen displays a landmark picture that changes based on where you are and what time of day it is, with added graphics and animation alerting you of your mobile phone status (battery charge, missed calls, etc.). For example, the battery charge is displayed by an air balloon in the photo that high up in the sky when the battery is full, but increasingly closer to the ground when the battery starts running out.
   
• New social paradigms. The impact of phenomena like Myspace, Youtube, Facebook etc. is not limited to the web. Also electronic products have to be rethought within a social dimension. He shows an example of a mobile phone application that Samsung developed in Korea that allows people to listen to music together with others, wherever they may be (the software supports groups of up to 6 people).
   
• Managing the explosion of choices. Users are suffering under an excess of options, both in terms of devices as in terms of services. This is even exacerbated by a condition of “time starvation” that many live in — which leads to the fact that only 1% of people actually read the manuals of the products they buy, even though companies spend serious resources on producing them. The user experience therefore needs to take into account the fact that people need to be reassured. Some mobile network operators have come to similar conclusions.
   

Chang, also referring to some of the concepts he discussed during the first part of his talk, concluded his presentation by saying that an electronic product should “lead a person along a journey made out of a series of gratifying stages, thanks to a user experience that captures the imagination and reveals unexpected worlds.”.

An American in the audience, who was clearly pleased with the presentation, commented afterwards: “you are bringing magic into product design”.

This compliment could also be interpreted negatively, in the sense that interaction design sometimes runs the risk of becoming more magic than science. It is clear however that people like Donghoon Chang, who have a liberal arts background, can see certain aspects that technologists cannot (and vice versa). A multi-disciplinary design team that brings together these two points of view into a constructive dialogue is one of those “secrets” in how future innovative products ought to be designed.”

It is the third issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here).

Jonas Löwgren wrote an article on fluency to illustrate the experiential qualities of digital products and services. Fluency “refers to the degree of gracefulness with which the user deals with multiple demands for her attention and action, particularly in augmented spaces where the user moves through shifting ecologies of people, physical objects, and digital media.”

There are also articles on sound as part of the overall experience of a product’s expression, tools for including user-interaction in materials selection, lead-user innovation in the design-based outdoor clothing and equipment sector in the northwest of the United Kingdom, and on artistic inquiry as a means to inform interdisciplinary research.

Designing technologies for an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and capabilities of potential users.

Drawing from the results of an extended participatory design study conducted with microfinance group members in rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), he outlines a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such users.

The results of this study are used to motivate the design of the CAM toolkit, which includes support for paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and disconnected operation.

Parikh discusses possible topics for future work and his long-term research vision.

Watch video

(via Niti Bhan)

He reports on it on his Italian blog and here is my translation:

“The lecture was announced as being about user experience design and the hall was full with people curious to hear more about Samsung’s vision in that respect.

The speaker walks on stage and the first slide he shows is a beautiful photo of a buddhist temple in Korea. He explains where the temple is. Fair enough, this has been a source of inspiration to him, so let’s now start with the real talk, right. No, not exactly. We will study the experience of visiting the temple.

Next up is a picture of a forest. Chang explains that we are walking in the direction of the temple, describes the sensations that the photo is not able to convey, such as the wind, the sounds, the smells…

New slide: a gate. Also here the speaker stops to reflect on what can be perceived and sensed standing in front of such an object. At this point, the audience which was expecting a gallery overview of innovative Samsung project, starts resigning itself to the fact that the temple walk still has a long way to go. And that’s exactly what happens: more photos and stories show a succession of stages that in the end lead to the temple itself and to its interiors. Once the temple photo series is finished, Chang runs through the ‘experience’ again and analyses it in a series of actions taken, movements gone through, and symbols met, and underlines how those in charge of designing the temple were already designing the user experience centuries ago, even its emotional aspects.

We learn therefore that also Samsung embraced emotional design. But what does this mean concretely when you are dealing with the design of electronic products? The four crucial points that Chang’s design group has adopted, state that products must:

• be intriguing and innovative, with an aura of mystery that invites to discovery, without confusing the user;
• be multi-sensorial, i.e. stimulating the various senses of the users, also in ways never seen before. To illustrate the point, he shows a Samsung MP3 reader that can be put in the water when we take a bath and makes the water vibrate, by creating small waves that follow the music and come together again in the end;
• provide layers of experience to the user that reveal themselves progressively over time, thereby deepening the use of the product. Here he shows a mobile phone that can be opened and transformed in a micro “boom box” to share music with others;
• have an intuitive interface, i.e. guarantee the compliance with the more traditional usability perspective. And here it is of particular relevance to strive for the most intuitive use possible of the full-touch LCD, which is now becoming more popular thanks to devices such as the iPhone or the Samsung F700, which is now also available on the European market.

In the last part of his talk, Chang discusses some problems that are specific to user experience design and require particular attention. But that I will discuss in another post.”

While written about developmental economics, poverty, foreign aid and the grand plans designed to save the poor from themselves, Easterly proposes an alternate approach based on the principles of the user centered approach to design of systems and solutions. Do exploratory research, understand the needs of the users, observe them and the systems they already have in place for addressing the issue or existing grassroots solutions [jugaad or bottom up innovation], use these as prototypes for the design of replicable successful programs, cross pollinate ideas that work across different regions or countries, adapt programs and plans to local culture and social customs - basically the user centered approach to the implementation of aid programs.

But Easterly doesn’t actually use any of these terms that we may be familiar with, he classifies the top down, traditional global foreign aid approach as one designed by “Planners” and the bottom up, grassroots, user centered approach which relies on feedback mechanisms and accountability as one developed by “Searchers”.

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“Clearly, children love the machine. Most of them had never seen a computer before and the great design of the laptop was compelling. They are learning about technology even as they play. But why do they like it? By far, the most used function of the one laptop designed specifically for the world’s poorest children is taking pictures. The webcam–taking pictures and sharing them with friends–is the most discussed computer function. That’s cool and great, but is it the highest priority for ‘education?’”

Then there is the cost. I personally hadn’t added up all the money that goes into the $100″ laptop. What, in fact, is the true bottom line cost of the OLPC? Will governments that accept the OLPC subsidize the operating cost–electricity, repairs, etc.?

Finally, there is the actual teaching. The laptops in Nigeria came with pre-loaded learning programs. The BBC story doesn’t say who wrote these lessons and where they came from. The teachers appear to like them and perhaps that is enough. But is it? Were the lessons written by teachers in Nigeria? Would you accept lesson plans from another country for your kids?”

The project clearly suffers from a top-down approach, where “designing for” is the paradigm rather than “designing with” or “designing from”. There was as far as I know no structured needs analysis here, no contextual studies, no ethnography, no qualitative insights. Such an approach cannot lead to anything but unintended consequences and may be potentially undermining the project itself. There are many lessons to be learned here, by the OLPC (”one laptop per child”) team, but also by any company or organisation trying to deliver designed solutions for “end-users” who then turn out to have different needs and contexts that had somehow been anticipated.

But of course, we can always blame those “end-users” instead of learning some important lessons, and I am afraid this is definitely going to be part of the debate that will undoubtedly ensue.

- Read BBC story
- Read Nussbaum commentary

So I asked her to write a short essay for the website of Torino 2008 World Design Capital precisely on that topic. She accepted and wrote a great story. Just a few lines to wet your appetite:

“The technically proficient, the engineering experts, the world class designers are all who practice in conditions of abundance. They create with no shortage of materials, funds, resources, fuel or energy. If we need to design products and systems under maximum constraints using minimal resources, husbanding our natural resources and rationing our use, where better to begin seeking answers but amongst those who already live under these conditions?”

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(Thanks Allan for plugging it so quickly.)

Mobile phones are making life better for people in remote, underserved areas of India. They no longer have to walk kilometers to public call offices to use a telephone—an essential tool for buying and selling goods based on the latest market data, getting credit from lenders and other commonplace activities. So far, most of the benefits have come from one of the phone’s simplest features: voice calls.

With more than 250 million mobile users and 6 million new ones added each month, India now has the “teledensity” to support more-sophisticated mobile technologies, which could have a big impact on Indian society and the economy in the next few years. (An extra 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country leads to an additional 0.59 percentage points of growth in GDP per person, according to a London Business School study.) These include “voice broadcast” services that would let a truck owner inform residents of a village about a scheduled trip to the city, or doctors announce the availability of polio vaccinations. A more complex system would allow a small business, say, to keep track of shipments. What’s holding up these services is the lack of mobile banking.

The article profiles activities of Reliance Communications, ekgaon technologies, and A.Little.World.

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Nokia principal researcher Jan Chipchase’s investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. Along the way, he’s made some unexpected discoveries: about the novel ways illiterate people interface with their cellphones, or the role the cellphone can sometimes play in commerce, or the deep emotional bonds we all seem to share with our phones.

Jan Chipchase can guess what’s inside your bag and knows all about the secret contents of your refrigerator. It isn’t a second sight or a carnival trick; he knows about the ways we think and act because he’s spent years studying our behavioral patterns. He’s traveled from country to country to learn everything he can about what makes us tick, from our relationship to our phones (hint: it’s deep, and it’s real) to where we stow our keys each night.

Jan’s discoveries and insights help inspire the development of the next generations of phones and services at Nokia. As he puts it, if he does his job right, you should be seeing the results of his research hitting the streets and airwaves within the next 3 to 15 years.

Watch video

Bangalore: In his quest to understand the Indian consumer, Jan Blom, a boyish looking 32-year-old from Finland, finds himself back in college.

The senior design manager at Nokia Design, a part of Nokia Oyj, moved here a few months ago, driven by a partnership between the world’s largest cellphone maker and the substantially tinier Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. The 60-seat private college here is run by a trust of six women, who canvassed door-to-door for students when they started in 1996. And, yet, it is a place that Nokia thinks might yield the next big innovation.

Meet the “cool hunters”.

Big firms are turning to such small and focused niche gro-ups in search of trends and also to better understand consumers, especially in complex, developing markets such as India and China. In the case of Nokia and Srishti, the firm hopes to get these ideas by assigning projects to students learning art, visual communication or product design.

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In the interest of sharing this story with non-French speakers, here is my translation:

Design at the heart of the Samsung strategy

“We have three levels of design analysis: global design intelligence, future design intelligence and corporate design implementation,” says Harry Choi of Samsung’s Corporate Design Center. The text below is based on an interview with him:

• “Global design intelligence”: Six international offices (San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Milan and Bangalore) gather the various sociological trends that characterise the forms, materials and colours of the local design. The experts — architects, interior designers or stylists — do not work full time for Samsung, but are commissioned to regularly brief Samsung on the strategic developments taking place in their geographical area. 
• “Corporate design implementation”: Here the experts’ information and analyses are reinterpreted from an industrial perspective. It was through the analysis of the products of our various competitors — LG, Bosch, Siemens — that we became fully aware of the coherence of their product line, and the relative incoherence of our own. So we created our Corporate Design Center to create a more integrate design between the products coming from our various activity sectors. We always choose for one single design for a product. It is the same all over the world. It is impossible for us, because of industrial and economic reasons, to develop regional designs. But that doesn’t mean that we do not respond to local needs. For instance, we consider China as a market on its own and we have products there that do not exist anywhere else. We also create “limited edition” series, particularly for the European market, where people are fond of high-end products. We do not make much profit with these products, but they enhance our brand image. 
• “Future design intelligence”: Here we develop a product roadmap that foresees and prepares our various product lines within a five year time frame. This becomes an important strategic direction for the company, and it is constantly updated. The example of the television is very illustrative. The technology has evolved a lot in five years. We have gone from the Hertz diffusion to TNT, to cable and now to IPTV. The external optical media and their associated connections change practically every year. And the aesthetics are evolving as well.

Two products, two design strategies

“When we think of a printer nowadays, we think of a noisy, ugly and cumbersome object,” says Jun Won Bae, designer of the SCX 4500 printer. “That was at least the result of our preliminary studies. Based on these findings and on a clear public demand, we decided to devote more attention to the design. We ended up with a trendsetting product.”

“We focussed on four reference values to change the traditional mindset people have of a printer:

• Use value - We reduced the surface and volume of the object to the minimum, by turning it into the smallest laser printer in the world.
• Visual value - We have chosen for a shiny and glossy black. We were inspired by the lacquer of the grand piano and the simple forms this object has. We also avoided the traditional shapes of buttons by creating tactile zones and blue backlit areas to indicate the functions of the printer.
• Tactile value - The materials were chosen for their tactile quality, and are very different from what is usually offered.
• Sound value - We have reduced the printing noise to 45 decibels, from a standard minimum of 50 decibels for other printers.

This small printer is aimed at the SoHo market (small office and housing) but it has a premium price. We want to bring design intot the office, as Apple has successfully done these last few years. In fact, Apple is the exclusive distributor of this product on the American market.

The manufacturing of this printer requires a multitude of skills: mechanical, micro-electronics, chemical (for the inks), and software. This is why there are so few players in this market segment and the Chinese for instance are not attacking us here. We are for now just focusing on a particular sector — laser printers — where we already master the technology. Since we can no longer conquer the market by making conventional printers, we put our energy on design. And for the moment, this strategy is working.”

There is also an interview in this section with the designer of the G800 touch phone.

A university dedicated to R&D

In 1995, Samsung created a design school in Seoul. The Samsung Art and Design Institute (SADI) has meanwhile become a real study laboratory for the group.

Originally the school was dedicated to graphic design and fashion styling. But in the last two years it has opened itself up to industrial design and technology design. Here are some of the student prototypes [which do not seem to be based on much user research].

• Bong-Bong Boxer - Instead of forbidding children to fight with each other, it might make more sense to give them the tools to do so without getting hurt: gloves, “shoes” and a helmet. 
• Okids phone - This multifunction phone is for the little ones. In phone mode, the child can call preprogrammed numbers and push an emergency button. In “heart” mode, thanks to its ingenious pivotal rotation system, the screen becomes a gaming screen with a separate keyboard. 
• Talk to me - Each flower is an MP3 recorder and belongs to a member of the family. They can all leave a message on it when leaving the house. When a message is left behind, the lower part of the flower emits a soft pulsing light to indicate that it has something to say. 
• Spicy cartridge - This box contains little spice containers. A rear projector provides information on each of the containers. It could be part of an intelligent cuisine where recipes are proposed based on the available ingredients. 
• Mamang - This object reinvents the rocking horse. The child is perched on its back and gets solicited by its parents through the built-in screen and camera. 
• Take1 - This miniature camera with an omnidirectional screen and built-in tripod, provides bare essential functionality but is highly discrete. 
• Draw your finger - A mobile phone specially developed for the visually impaired. 

The report also contains a slideshow of products about to be launched on the market.

The capital designation was proposed by the council President Peter Zec to “promote and encourage the use of design to further the social, economic and cultural development of the world’s cities.”

Torino of Italy was named the WDC pilot city [2008], but Seoul was selected as the first official one. Seoul will play the role of the world’s capital of design for one year.

- Read full story
- Links: ICSID | World Design Capital | Torino 2008, World Design Capital