• Panel discussion on technological overload with Stefana Broadbent of Swisscom Innovations (14:25);
• Daniela Cerqui, anthropologist at University of Lausanne, about “Towards a society of cyborgs?”;
• Jan Chipchase, principal scientist at Nokia Research Center, about “Literacy, Communication & Design” or how illiterate people are lead users for people who want simplicity;
• Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art.com) and France Cadet (french artist) about “do biologists dream of robotic art?”;
• Nathan Eagle, research scientist at MIT, about “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”;
• Fabien Girardin, researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University, about “Embracing the real world’s messiness”;
• Adam Greenfield, principal at Studies and Observations NYC, about “Everyware: Further down the rabbit hole”;
• Sampo Karjalainen, chief creative officer at Sulake Corporation, about “Open-ended play in Habbo”; and
• Jan-Christoph Zoels, director of user experience design at Experientia, about “Jumping jack flash – new forms of interactions”.

The first study in this series, conducted in Helsinki during the summer of 2003, was designed to understand the extent to which people noticed incoming communication. Since then the study has evolved to encompass the carrying location of other objects, collect a visual snapshot of mobile phones and their ‘owner’s’ and has since been run in eleven countries across four continents.

Nokia’s ethnographic research sounds basic, even primitive. It’s akin to Dr. Livingston in “Darkest Africa,” sussing out the “natives”: how many yams they eat in a week, who tells the iconic stories, what clans do to maintain hegemony, etc. Very ho-hum, except that the technology is “cool.” Cellphone ethnographic research, so far as I can tell, studies behaviors related to product use but as the snippet in BW reveals, not the inner workings of cellphone users — how they relate to cellphones in phenomenological ways, for example.

This quote comes from a post on the anthrodesign Yahoo! group which immediately provoked reactions. It is still going on.

Tyler of Sprint Nextel supports Chipchase but arguest that “we need a comprehensive theory of design that works for anthropology (or human research for commerce)”, whereas Sridhar Dhulipala points to a report in the Times of India, Bangalore, on the usage of mobile phones. Whereas the Nokia report strikes as typical corporate leadership behaviour, Dhulipala thinks that this other story provides a contrasting insight.

Christina Bolas, an anthropologist at Sprint Nextel, was recently involved in “true ethnography of cell phone use” beyond the basic “needs assessment” or “behaviors related to product use”, but her main difficulty was “getting the results heard and supported by the pile of people needed to make real change in the industry”. She concludes: “Not only do we need a comprehensive theory of design that works for anthropology, but we also need a theory that takes into account the inevitable world of corporate politics within which that theory must live.”

Finally, Molly Wright Steenson (a former Interaction-Ivrea colleague) underlines the intrinsic value of the ethnographic approach as it greatly change what you expected to find.

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.

Read interview

“Experience shifting raises all sorts of interesting questions about empathic design, where from an physiological-emotional perspective experience designers will literally be able put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

What are the characteristics of the people whose experiences will define, well, the essence of the experience we wish to design for, to communicate? It can be anything from designing an out of the box experience to learning, knowing what it feels like to walk in a Sao Paulo subway station, the touch of a razor from a Chinese back street barber, and yes, will encompass sexual encounters.

In this world DRM boils down to removing experiences from human memory and the inevitable badly written DRM leaves its host as a vegetable.

A new profession will arise – people whose job it is to experience stuff, and who will be judged on their ability to capture the subtleties of any difference process, task or context. With a distinction between raw experiences and those enhanced though stimulants, or post production.”

Read full story

The two slideshows used during his presentation are available for download.

Exploratory field user research (PowerPoint, 3 mb, 64 slides) describes exactly that: how a company like Nokia uses exploratory field user research techniques to design better products. Techniques covered include street interviews and observations, diaries, shadowing, home visits, contextual interviews, lead users, mystery shoppers, data logging, asking smarter questions, and how all of this is communication in the end. Make sure to read the notes too.

The second presentation, Repair Cultures (PowerPoint, 3.4 mb, 37 slides), is an elaboration of earlier presentations by Chipchase and illustrates how mobile phone repair practices, observed in Ji Lin, Chengdu, Xiamen, Lhasa, Ho Chi Minh City, Delhi, Ulan Bataar and Soweto, ought to be seen as a culture of innovation.

A person is literate who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life, and can apply this knowledge to function in a textual environment.

799 million people are illiterate. Illiteracy can be found anywhere, including London, New York and Tokyo. In addition, there are many people who are using devices that do not support their native language.

Mobile devices that were designed with a Western audience in mind are increasingly used in places like Africa and India with much lower levels of structured learning.

Design research, as the only tool that can really address this problem, reveals a number of interesting insights that designers can act upon.

- Download presentation (PowerPoint, 5.5 mb, 82 slides)
- Related essay

In his talk tomorrow entitled “Jumping jack flash – new forms of interactions“, Jan-Christoph will present “some key trends and design ideas for our interactions with devices, services or applications”.

“As more and more devices support location-aware, contextual or rich media, how will we interact with them, choose content, navigate or connect multiple sources of information? The presentation explores gestural, haptic and other sensorial interfaces for a variety of applications. The success of Nintendo’s Wii game controller exemplifies the migration of traditional task-based interfaces into the realm of explorative and entertaining interactions. What will the poetic interfaces of tomorrow be?”

Other speakers include Robert Scobble, vice president of media development at Podtech; Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art; Stefana Broadbent, head of User Adaption Lab at Swisscom; Jan Chipchase, principal scientist at Nokia Research Center; Bruno Giussani, writer; and Sister Judith Zoebelein, editorial director of the Internet Office of the Holy See; to name just a few.

UPDATE:
- Tom Hume’s notes on Jan-Christoph’s talk
- Jan-Christoph Zoels : quelles nouvelles formes d’interaction ? French summary by Daniel Kaplan
- Audio interview of Jan-Christoph Zoels by Nicole Simon

Following a July 2006 field study in Uganda, and previous presentations on shared phone practices and street charging services, they now explored the Village Phone initiative between the Grameen Foundation, Nokia and local micro-finance organisations in Uganda, that is available as a downloadable photo essay.

The Village Phone extends regular base station cellular coverage from around 15 kilometers to around 30 kilometers through the use of a village phone kit – an antenna and ten meter cable (shown above) and a coupler (shown below) connected to a regular Nokia 1100 mobile phone plus of course, a micro-finance loan. The net result? In a number of cases it provides the first convenient, reliable and affordable connectivity to the outside world for many rural communities as well as providing a stable income for the local entrepreneur that takes out the loan.

To what extent do villagers need access to mobile phone? Who is in more need of personal, convenient synchronous and asynchronous communication – someone in London who works 9 to 5, 5 days a week or someone in rural Uganda working 5 to 9, 7 days a week? IMHO the impact on quality of life is far greater in the rural context and the some of the innovations this enables are touched on in this longish essay on Shared Phone Use. One example of the benefits of connectivity? Sente – the transfer of money via mobile phone that essentially also extends regular banking services such as the remittance of cash to these communities.

- Read abstract
- Download presentation (Powerpoint or PDF – 2 mb)

My Experientia business partner and friend, Jan-Christoph Zoels, is one of the main speakers. Others include Robert Scobble, vice president of media development at Podtech; Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art; Stefana Broadbent, head of User Adaption Lab at Swisscom; Jan Chipchase, principal scientist at Nokia Research Center; Bruno Giussani, writer; and Sister Judith Zoebelein, editorial director of the Internet Office of the Holy See; to name just a few.

In the interview, they discuss how the design of the conference last year, almost accidentally, became deeply human-centred and how they have added even more opportunities (LIFT +, Open Stage) this year for attendees to act like active contributors rather than passive recipients of somebody else’s messages.

Read interview

Jan Chipchase and Indri Tulusan of Nokia Research set out to explore this topic during a July 2006 field study in Uganda as part of a more in-depth study into shared phone use.

There are two forms of mobile phone battery charging services in Kampala – either offered as an additional service by phone kiosk operators or as a stand alone service. It costs 500 Ugandan Shillings (0.2 Euro) to have a battery recharged similar to the price of 2 or 3 phone calls. Whist both services appear to thrive there are a number of barriers to use: customers cannot use their phone whilst the battery is being charged; the customer risks, or perceives the risk that their battery being swapped for an inferior one; a perceived risk of phone theft – signs that suggest service providers are not responsible for loss or theft are evident.

For many Ugandan rural communities with no access to mains power car batteries are the primary means of providing electricity to the home. Businesses such as bars also run off car batteries but they are more likely to have their own power generator. A used car battery costs 30 to 40 dollars and can keep a household powered for a month, though in a bar the same battery might last a week. The homes we visited ran electrical items included radios, CD players, television and domestic lighting.

It can take 3 to 5+ days to have a car battery recharged at the process involves delivering the car-battery to a charging service often tens of kilometers away the nearest town that has mains electricity access. The battery is taken and returned by a trusted and friendly taxi driver or trader. It takes 3 days to charge a battery, longer if the town where the service is based itself experiences power cuts. The cost of charging a battery is around 1,000 Ugandan shillings (0.4 Euro), not including delivery. (As a comparison a mobile phone battery costs half as much to be recharged using one of the mobile phone street charging services mentioned above).

Two short presentations co-authored by Jan Chipchase and Indri Tulusan are available for download from research.nokia.com:
- Power Up: Street Charging Service in Kampala – PowerPoint or PDF (3 mb)

- Rural Charging Service, Uganda – PowerPoint or PDF (2 mb)

Jan Chipchase and Indri Tulusan of Nokia Research set out explore this topic during a July 2006 field study in Uganda with a brief to understand how people share mobile phones. The research builds on prior research from India, China, Nepal and Mongolia and Indonesia.

Research abstract

The research team identified 6 shared use practices:

• an informal service called Sente that essentially enables a mobile phone owner to function as an ATM machine;
• mediated communication that neatly side-steps issues of technological and textual literacy;
• the ever popular practice of making missed calls;
• the pooling of resources to buy the lowest denominations of pre-paid airtime and extend the access days for the phone that is topped up;
• the use of community address books to reduce errors and (supposedly) encourage phone kiosk customer loyalty;
• and finally Step Messaging – the delivery of text and spoken messages on foot.

Whilst the baseline benefits of sole ownership and use of a mobile phone are personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication, the personal and convenient aspects of mobile phone ownership are compromised by sharing. This support the notion that phone sharing (as it is defined at the beginning of the essay) is seen as more of a transition to sole ownership than a naturally stable state.

For many poorer consumers in emerging markets other people’s perception that you are connected is the status symbol, a sign that you have arrived and in some senses are worth connecting to. When most of the members of a person’s peer group , or society are connected the focus of status shifts to the brand and model of device. phone ownership is not the same as use – if there are cheaper ways to communicate these will be used.

We are increasingly coming across what have termed unlikely consumers, where feature rich and once premium devices in the hands of the very poor and the myriad of ways the devices get there we have dubbed sideways adoption. Today the front-line of telecommunications innovation is in connecting the unconnected, and its a matter of time before today’s unlikely consumers become tomorrow’s innovators.

- research abstract
- research essay
- PowerPoint presentation (7 mb)
- list of related research

The essay is by far the most intelligent thing I have read on mobile TV in a long time. It is not long, it will take you 5 minutes.

Chipchase’s summary:

Learn ten things you didn’t know about Mobile TV in this essay.

A summary? Its all about a personal experiences; home use is surprisingly popular; watching is a small part of the whole; up to 4 people can view a mobile TV at the same time but the act of sharing changes what it means to be a phone; why accessories are a struggle; design content for changing user postures; immersion is possible but is it desirable?; interactive experiences require interaction which is difficult if the user is not holding the device; everything you wanted to know about very personal media consumption but were afraid to ask; and finally what, how and why people watch in secret.

- Read essay “Mobile TV, Personal Experiences”
- Download associated powerpoint (4.3 mb)

- Download paper “Personal Television” (pdf, 0.2 mb, 8 pages)
- Download associated powerpoint with use cases (7 mb)

The discipline under the spotlight this month is Research, and the first guest is Jan Chipchase, Principal Researcher in the Mobile HCI Group at Nokia Research, whose personal insights can be found on Future Perfect, Jan’s wonderful photo-intensive weblog. As he says: “… if I do my job right you’ll be using it 3 to 15 years from now.”

Read interview

The presentation introduced some of Nokia’s field research methods, points to why pretty much everyone on the planet can appreciate the benefits of having access to a mobile telephone (personal, convenient synchronous and asynchronous communication), and introduces findings from a recent field study in Uganda and Indonesia into shared phone use.

“I’ll expand on couple of points of the presentation in the coming weeks – in particular the practice of pooling resources to buy air time; the on-foot delivery of messages sent to phone kiosks – something that we’ve termed step messaging; and my personal favourite sente – the informal practice of sending money as airtime that effectively enables the owner of a mobile phone to offer basic ATM services. All examples of innovation through necessity.”

- Download presentation (pdf, 2.2 mb, 43 slides)
- Other Jan Chipchase presentations

“The journey has taken me to cities such as Chengdu, Delhi, Ulan Bataar, Ho Chi Minh and Lhasa with recent brief stopovers in Kampala and Soweto. They all contain clusters of shops and market stalls selling a mixture of used and new mobile phones, and whilst (in this instance) size does not necessarily matter, they often operate on a scale not seen in cities such as London or Tokyo.”

“The mobile phone market around Chengdu’s Tai Shen Lan Lu Market for example stretches across number of streets and shopping arcades and includes 100′s of small shops and stalls. If you want a snapshot of urban mobile phone consumers in emerging markets this is a good place to start.”

He then goes on to explore what sets these locations apart from cities in more ‘emerged’ markets; how these mobile phone repair cultures are different from the everyday repair shops for other mainstream electronics; why these informal repair cultures exist at all; what we can learn from informal repair cultures; and what it would take to turn cultures of repair into cultures of innovation.

- Read full story
- Printer friendly version
- Download presentation (MS PowerPoint, 3.6 mb, 38 slides)

A series of contextual interviews were conducted in public spaces of Helsinki, Milan and New York collecting 419 responses in total.

The results show a strong tendency by gender, with females using bags and males using trouser pockets to place their mobile phones.

Comments from participants suggested users did not place the phone wherever available, but rather considered many aspects, such as the convenience, tolerance to multiple postures, risk of theft, comfort, or impact to their appearance. The authors learnt that bag users miss incoming alerts more often than with other carrying methods.

Based on the outcome of the study, the authors discuss the challenges in designing mobile devices, in particular mobile phones, and suggest that phones need to be more noticeable as a notification device.

Download study (pdf, 343 kb, 8 pages)

(via Carolyn Wei, who also provides some additional notes on the study)

This paper by Jan Chipchase (Nokia research manager) et al. describes a nine-month cross-cultural field study of what people consider to be mobile essentials, how those mobile essentials are carried and problems typically encountered.

Through careful field observations and in-depth interviews of 17 participants in four cities (Berlin, San Francisco, Shanghai and Tokyo), transitions between different situations turned out to be critical moments in which mobile essentials took on specific value, but also created problems of forgetting and loss.

The paper, which was first presented at the dux05 conference and is now published in AIGA’s Gain: Journal of Business and Design, introduces the notions of Center of Gravity, Point of Reflection and the Range of Distribution to describe user behaviours.

Based on the study findings nine product concepts related to mobile essentials were developed. One of the design concepts was the Reminder Shelf, a place where people could stow their mobile essentials by the door, as well as make digital reminders such as pictures of things to bring that were not on the shelf. The shelf design had a mobile charger to encourager users to put their phone on it.

Download case study (pdf, 381 kb, 8 pages)

(See also this post by Carolyn Wei who provides some longer notes on this study – scroll down)

He defines it as a blog “about the collision of people, society and technology, drawing on issues related to the user research that I conduct on behalf of my employer – Nokia”, but also as “a pause for reflection in our planet’s seemingly headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper.”

The blog, he says, contains material “that inspires or challenges me, helps me understand how the future might turn out.”

Jan splits his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services and products that we will be using 3 to 15 years from now. He specialises in taking teams of concept/industrial designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists, and ethnographers into the field and using their data to inform, inspire and affect how his colleagues think and what they do.

(via Eyebeam reBlog)