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Where You Carry, Why It Matters

(A short essay related this post can be found here).

Gazing into the future you may have already started thinking about concepts built around the idea of a wallet or purse. Everyone carries them, so why not extend their functionality to include, well, other stuff. Seems logical right?

Except that for many of the world’s urban dwellers the wallet or purse isn’t carried because quite simply people don't carry sufficient walletable or purseable objects to make such a container feasible. And even if it was feasible it would not necessarily be desireable because clustering objects in one place instantly creates an easier target for theft. For example in Japan and China wallet and purse adoption ranged from 98% in Tokyo, 54% in Beijing to a lowly 35% in Ji Lin - a sizeable 3rd tier city in China. And it's not that people don't have money - the percentage of people carrying cash is in each of these cities is in the high 90%s, it's simple that our notion of what people are likely to carry is limited by our own everyday experiences.

This was just one of the many snippets that came out of recent Nokia research with data collected from 1549 people in 11 cities on 4 continents: Helsinki, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, Kampala, Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Ji Lin between 2003 and 2006. The full presentation Where’s the Phone: Selected Data co-authored with my colleagues Cui Yanqing and Fumiko Ichikawa is downloadable as either Powerpoint or PDF [3MB]. (A full list of contributers can be found here).

The essay also touches on: where people carry their phone and why; the drivers for choosing to carry an object in a particular location; the extent to which people notice incoming communication; gender and cultural differences; phone strap usage; protective cover use and its implications for interaction; the likelyhood that a phone cover will be personalised. It closes with a few thoughts about what it might mean in terms of what and how we design.

Later this year my colleague Cui Yanqing will present A Cross Cultural Study on Phone Carrying and Physical Personalisation at the HCI International 2007 conference in Beijing, I'll point to the paper when it becomes available.

Writing from Tokyo | April 20, 2007 | Permalink