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Learning From Extreme Products
These photos, taken last year on a private trip to Chengdu, are from a shop selling equipment for the emergency services. As with the PLA store it was open to the public - so uniforms, accessories, ID badges and flashing lights to stick on the roof of your car were all for sale to whomever was able to stump up the cash.
Two police officers (or possibly private security guards, I'm not especially china-uniform-literate) were standing next to me checking out various electric shock devices and in the spirit of try-before-you-buy they decided to, well, try-before-they-bought. Since this was a small shop the electric current crackled a couple of feet from my face for each of the 3 models they tried. The guards appeared to be discussing the merits of each device before picking one out then moving on to negotiate the price with the owner.
The unique selling points appeared to be their size and whether the case was metal or plastic. The packaging advertised that they could shock to 35,000 Watts of power, a fact which I was not interested in validating. They had already succumbed to feature creep - the most feature rich included a torch, siren and electric shock button with the design making it possible to multi-task... see who you're electrocuting as they hold their hands up to cover their ears. I picked out a large plastic model which from the perspective of someone trying to subdue an assailant has the potential additional benefit of being usable as a cosh, it costs 100 RMB (8 Euro).
The three buttons on the device were identical so the only way to know which button belonged to which feature was trial and error. The design was not particularly smart given that people are prone to forget the details of infrequently carried out tasks. The electric shock feature did not work unless a plug, otherwise dangling from a short strap, was inserted in a socket on the base of the device. At least that's the theory - what is the quality assurance of a device that costs 100 RMB?
This shop happened to be in China, but I'm pretty sure I would have similar legal or grey-market consumer choices from Colombia to Canada, the UK to the US.
Designers often talk about learning from lead users or extreme users. What merits are there for looking at and learning from extreme products both in terms of their design, and in the moral/ethical/commercial/legal reaction of society to those products?
Writing from Tokyo | March 16, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
Learning from lead and extreme users. I like the way you put it. Obviously it is a very relevant statement also for user research project... The assumption is that these user groups do indicate something about future mainstream use. Never mind even it will not be prevalent eventually, we can also learn. But clearly for each social phenomena, should we estimate its future when we approach it. YC (from Singaphore CHenji airport Free Intenet Zone.
Posted by: yc at March 20, 2006 6:23 PM