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Physical Personalisation

What motivates people to customise their phones? Where are they customised? Why? And how can this influence the design of future devices?

The slides for a recent short presentation to NIFT Delhi is now online on research.nokia.com. Entitled Physical Personalisation of Phone Covers in Japan can be downloaded here [1 MB]. It's an example of quick-and-dirty research project (an afternoon collecting data by reviewing 6477 phone covers in a recycling plant) with a limited but interesting enough scope (document any physical customisation), that eventually led to researching a number of more meaty topics. It's also an example of something that would never make it to an academic conference, but has proved relevant in day to day work. There's a lesson there somewhere.

Captive audience here and related posts here.

Writing from Tokyo | April 24, 2006 | Permalink