July 23, 2006

Icons, Rituals

The role of faith, religious icons, rituals in everyday life, from Sao Paulo above, and Old Delhi below.

For everything I believe in there are more people who believe in something else. The same goes for the rest of you.

Posted by Jan at 07:44 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

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.

Posted by Jan at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Expectations Out of Sync

Wandering around UB and chance up disciples playing football in a temple complex. They invite me into the warmth for a reason - to mine the memory of my phone of all its value. Half a dozen files transferred from my device - particularly interested in obtaining photos of women from Japan.

Posted by Jan at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Custom No. Super Custom Yes

The photo above from a customer of Bowery Kitchen, Komazawa.

The super-customisation of mobile phones is gaining some traction here in Tokyo. Various shops in Shibuya will adorn your mobile phone (or iPod or digital camera) with rhinestones charging anything from 7,000 yen (50 Euro) for a pre-designed P900i cover to around 50,000 yen (350 Euro) for the full front and back design-to-order bling. Mostly but not exclusively for female clientel - men are starting to order quite gothic designs.

Jewel encrusting services can be found as an annex of some phone shops in popular shopping areas of Tokyo. Now nail shops are extending their offering to include mobile phone customisation - it's possible to order matching nail and phone designs.

(In my mind this is somehow all a logical progression from an analysis of 6447 used mobile phone covers and quick and dirty customisation)

I started out a sceptic but I have to admit some of the funkier pixel-art designs have started to grow on me.

Posted by Jan at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2005

Mobile Phone as Personal Shrine

What can you learn from products about to be recycled?

When I first moved to Japan one of the first exploratory studies I carried out was to try and figure out how and why people customise their phone cover. It's fairly common in Japan, Korea and to a lesser extent China to see phones adorned with stickers as well as the more usual phone straps. I was looking for inspiration for new applications and services and this seemed a good a place to start as any.

On a hot summer's day I traveled down to a mobile phone recycling plant on the edge of Tokyo and with the help of a number of friendly factory workers spent a few hours sorted through over 6,000 used phone covers, documenting all and any physical customisation that was evident. The result was several hundred photos of stickers of designs, logos, decorations and puri kura - the print club stickers that are still relatively popular in Japan and some Asian cultures.

Only 11% of the 6447 covers had some form of physical customisation. I was expecting this to be more based on ad-hoc observations from the street, though this reflects the places and people I hang out with. The range of physical customisation can be categorized into: stickers of logos; print club photos; telephone numbers; and illustrations/decorations. There were also a few examples of 'super customisation' where people had obviously put in a lot of time and effort detailling paint jobs, tagging, graffiti covering the whole device.

Why do people physically customize their phones with stickers?

Putting a sticker of a brand on a phone is an obvious and easy way to project lifestyle choices, peer group affiliations and aspirations - for example 'I'm into surfing' or 'my crew wear's Gravis'. It's socially acceptable, though in some environments a little dangerous, to have the phone out on display and at the very least answering a call and text messaging provide opportunties for others to see. Print club photos adorning the phone cover both confirm and project to others who the owner is connected with, in some regards a physical manifestation of the phone book. Customisation can also send the signal that 'this is mine, hands off'. Lastly, on a practical level it solves the problem of knowing widget is yours when all the widgets look alike. This was evident in a different study where we discovered the motivation behind walkie talkie customization by San Francisco bike messengers and of school calculators by Shanghai school kids was the same - to figure out which device belonged to them. If a company bought its workers the same mobile phone model, I would expect a large % of owners to add some small physical customisation for this same reason.

One of the surprise findings from the Tokyo recycling plant research was the use of the inside back cover as a form of 'mobile personal shrine' a place for storing photos/memories. Unless the back cover was removed from the phone no-one else would see or would know the photo was there so my assumption is that the photos were for personal consumption, or at the owner's discretion for sharing with someone else. A number of the photos appeared quite intimate - a couple hugging, a child, friends doing things in privacy of a photo booth.

There are of course limits to what you can learn through the documenting used products. Many of the best insights come from talking with people about why and how, whereas the recycling plant data just shows what. I had no way of knowing, for example whether the phones were for work or personal use or whether the owner was male or female.

More and more data can be embedded in and on objects - QR bar codes printed on the back of a sticker, RFID tags embedded in a device. A visit to a recycling plant in 2010 will probably yield much more about the product and its owners than we can ever know today. Interesting from the research point of view, by today's standards a major privacy issue for pretty much everyone else.

Posted by Jan at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)