Copycat Behaviours
Copycat behaviour of two friends riding the Xiamen to Gyulangyu Island ferry.
To what extent are our own behaviours rooted by the behaviour of our peers? Or, bearing in mind they are not all equal, to what extent are our behaviours rooted by the behaviour of strangers?
Writing from Tokyo | July 27, 2006 | Permalink
Cultures of Repair, Innovation
Update: a slightly more print friendly version of this post appears here and the slides of the presentation can be downloaded via here [4MB].
In an effort to understand the total user experience I've taken time out during recent field studies in emerging markets to explore local repair cultures. 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.
What sets these locations apart from cities in more 'emerged' markets? Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally. Repairs are often carried out with little more than a screwdriver, a toothbrush (for cleaning contact points) the right knowledge and a flat surface to work on. Repair manuals (which appear to be reverse engineered) are available, written in Hindi, English and Chinese and can even be subscribed to, but there is little evidence of them being actively used. Instead many of the repairers rely on informal social networks to share knowledge on common faults, and repair techniques. It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open the manual itself. Delhi has the distinction of also offering a wide variety of mobile phone repair courses at training institutes such as Britco and Bridco turning out a steady flow of mobile phone repair engineers. To round off the ecosystem wholesalers' offer all the tools required to set up and run a repair business from individual components and circuit board schematics to screwdrivers and software installers.
How are mobile phone repair cultures different from the everyday repair shops for other mainstream electronics filled with televisions and video recorders? For a start consider the volumes of mobile phones in the marketplace compared to other electronics. Network effects soon kick in - it's easier to find a dead RAZR to cannabalise for spares than spares for a Sony DVD drive drive quite simply because there's more of them about. The physical size of the products to be repaired is also an factor - consider the space required to store and repair 200 mobile phones vs CRT televisions. As objects that many consider essential tools for everyday life mobile phones are carried, dropped, sat on, run over, submerged in a wide variety of situations leading to use cases outside the parameters of most phones. Finally, for many emerging market consumers the phone is considered an essential tool for conducting a successful business whether it's a boda-boda driver in Kampala (gentleman on moped in photo, below) or a midwife in Xiamen. If a person has the choice between repairing a television or a (shared) mobile phone which do you think he or she would choose first?
Each of the cities mentioned above offers more formal repair services, usually officially through customer care service centers, but the scale and sophistication of what is on offer informally is way beyond what many readers of Future Perfect will be familiar. And yes, many of the places mentioned already have networks to (from my observations) efficiently recycle, repair and re-use a wide variety objects including electronics . But in the spirit of the Future Perfect let's start with a very basic question - why do these informal repair cultures exist at all? What is so different between London and Lhasa or Helsinki and Ho Chi Minh?
The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity - highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee - having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second or third+ ownership. In many cases these users cannot afford to be without their mobile phone, not in the social sense of being out of touch (which is valid enough), but in many instances because their livelihoods depend on it. On the supply side there is a ready pool of sufficiently skilled labour, ready access to tools, components and above all knowledge.
It's worth acknowledging that grey and black goods and services are also part of the mobile phone market ecosystem - whether it's passing faked goods off as originals or offering pirated software. Some markets also sell a wide variety of phones that copy the industrial designs of other products, examples are shown here and and example of how it can unfold here (these two links are unrelated). These are however, only a part of the whole market ecosystem and from my understanding are small in scale within the context of the physical markets' themselves, compared to the repair services on offer. And before you ask - no, I'm not arguing that piracy is a minor issue.
For consumers the informal repair culture is largely convenient, efficient, fast and cheap, reducing the total cost of ownership for people for whom a small drop in price may make the difference between having or not having a phone. The culture of repair also increases the lifetime of products lowering their environmental impact (though this could be offset by other factors such as inefficiency of using old batteries).
What can we learn from informal repair cultures? Aside from the benefits, what are the risks for consumers and for companies whose products are repaired, refurbished and resold? Given the benefit to (bottom of the pyramid) consumers are there elements of the repair ecosystem that can be exported to other cultures? Can the same skills be applied to other parts of the value chain? And, turning to my original interest in this topic and the work we do in the Mobile HCI Group, given the range of resources and skills available what would it take to turn cultures of repair into cultures of innovation?
I'm at Cape Town University today discussing qualitative research methods and Informal Repair Cultures. The slides of the presentation can be downloaded via here [4MB download] and related presentations here.
Writing from Cape Town | July 3, 2006 | Comments (4) | Permalink
Food Delivery, Definition of Food
Xiamen above. Photo of a McDonalds Tokyo below (but ultimately it could be anywhere, including Xiamen).
Writing from Tokyo | June 15, 2006 | Permalink
Copycat Behaviours
Futons aired on only one floor of a housing estate in Higashi Yama, below.
For the Tokyophiles amongst you Higashi Yama is an interesting mix of Japanese social, company and private apartment blocks in area that is somewhat of a no-mans-land. Distinctly and pleasantly different.
Writing from Higashi Yama | June 10, 2006 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Magnitude
Its often quoted that a phone company is the worlds biggest camera manufacturer and music player manufacturer, the magnitude of things indeed, Charlie. With us from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep and, from a lot of field research I can confidently say most places in between.
But who is the world's biggest alarm clock manufacturer?
Waved goodbye to a rain soaked Xiamen and Gulangyu today. Alas, no more peering off the service roof of tall buildings to scope a city, or hanging out with Chinese manual labourers on rain sodden bulding sites. But good to be home. One more field study in Tokyo then next stop Africa.
Writing from Xiamen | May 23, 2006 | Permalink
Open Air Gallery
A passer by checks out a Sid-Viciousesque worker taking a cigarette in the doorway of the Xin Hua Book Store, Xiamen. The front facade of the store is protected by a variety of old doors - many which still have door knobs attached.
From a collage of 40 prints.
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Literacy & Understanding
Writing from Xiamen | May 22, 2006 | Permalink
A Tripod In Cinema Moment
Watched a subtitle-free Chinese language version of a certain hollywood movie today. You can tell something about the state of movie piracy in a country when people from the previous showing stream out and one of them is casually folding his extended tripod as he heads for the exit. Recording onto MiniDV I reckon, but didn't ask.
Still, its not quite as brazen as pirate TV in Ulan Bataar.
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Learning From Retro
A visit to Jiang Tou Market in Xiamen and 600 Yuan (60 Euro) buys you a new retro working English language GSM phone. Note the number of buttons compared to this lo-hi design. Starts with a HelloMoto screenshot and an extended and quite loud Chinese pop song.
Writing from Jiang Tou Market | | Permalink
Pay-As-You-Go
Interesting to see mainstream PC software adopt the pay-as-you-go model.
What people are able and willing to pay for. Why does it not cost money every time you access your phone's address book? Or switch the phone on? Or for that matter to switch your phone off?
Writing from Fujian Province, Lost in | | Permalink
Advertising Touch
Ferry commuters support themselves by grabbing ceiling mounted handles. If the body beomes a network capable of sending and receiving data, will we need to be more selective about what we touch? Will gloves be sold on their data blocking properties - a firewall or woolwall?
In contexts where information flows to and from the body network, who will want to de-stabilise a user's balance to trigger tactile interaction? In the case of advertising what form of interaction counts as opting-in? If the handle design included small displays rather than the current paper adverts, how might the information on the handle display change according to who is holding it?
Writing from Hukeng | May 21, 2006 | Permalink
Winding Down, Wrapping Up
The field study is completed and the team has headed its separate ways. There are a few days rest before the next study starts and for me at least its an opportunity to explore Fujian Province.
Jumping from the context of one in-depth field study to another can feel like a series of unreal experiences. As one of the team so succinctly put it "It's like a holiday romance without the romance, and without the holiday". A unique and mostly positive experience, but you know it's not going to last. We are drawn together by shared goals, arrive in a foreign destination, put our heads down and get on with it. The work allows us to confront, explore and document experiences that are then discussed during analysis sessions, over restaurant meals, walks through neighbourhoods, and evenings spent sipping drinks on the verandah. We revel in documenting the minutiae of the mundane but in many ways don't need to deal with the mundane ourselves. Beds are made in our absence, dirty laundry disappears to re-appear fresh and typically ironed, tables come set with food and drinks, and is cleared without our assistance. Does being removed from these everyday experiences hinder or support understanding the live's of our study participants?
And yet it's not strictly true that we are removed from it all - we carry tools that allow us to converse with home - conversations about laundry, building contractors and hospital appointments. If it were a holiday the romance would be to talk regular stuff with loved one's back home.
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Scars As Conversation Starters
A nice moment in Jiang Tou Phone Market where we get to compare body scars. He'd had some major surgery on his head, arms and chest. How behaviours are affected by assumptions of shared experiences? How this might be manipulated?
Another design 'homage' from the same market, below.
Writing from Jiang Tou Market | May 19, 2006 | Permalink
Charging Larger Objects
In a city where garage parking is not common, how to charge personal vehicles, such as this motorcycle above?
In this Xiamen street a power cable leads from an upstairs apartment, circles a collumn, is wrapped around the handle-bars (detail in above photo), in part so the converter is supported, before being plugged into the frame. A simple example of a technique for coping with the real world.
Writing from Xiamen | May 18, 2006 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Waiting For the Storm (To Pass)
What role can stories play in selling research? Not just to communicate the results but to stir interest the methods, the personalities, the stories behind the data. I have an Indian colleague who rides around rural India on his Enfield motorbike collecting field data. I know when I get his email I'll learn something new, and in part I can appreciate his effort in getting out there.
Today's story is of the research team riding out a typhoon sitting in the guesthouse on an island in the South China Sea - mopping up streams of water that made it through the blinds and mosquito nets. Telephone coversations accompanied to the sound of broken glass communicate enough of the details themselves, though from recent experience earthquakes require a running commentary to make sense (we had an unusually long day-time quake in Tokyo recently). But for tonight I'm not yet sure how this story ends - its still being written. Time to waterproof the camera and play around outside.
And the photo above? A flash picking up a moment in the life of a rain drop taken on the rather blustery guesthouse roof. A chance to try new stuff whilst waiting for the storm to pass.
Writing from Xiamen | May 17, 2006 | Permalink
Flattery or Fakes?
A phone design modelled on a Vertu above, and a Nokia 3230 below. Possibly enough to fool someone from a distance if they were to glance at it, but not under closer examination. From the mobile phone market in Xiamen, more to follow if I get the chance.
What can be copied easily? Does the job of effectively copying become harder as devices become complicated?
Writing from Xiamen | | Comments (2) | Permalink
Apartment, Typhoon
An advertisement close to Xiamen University (below) for an apartment with 2 bedrooms, kitchen and washroom space for1500 RMB (150 Euro) a month. I've not managed to get a photo of it yet but looking at the larger apartment blocks you know what apartment is for rent because a large banner with a phone number is draped over the balcony. The presence of the banner is enough to know the basic service that is offered (an apartment being rented), and the location of the apartment, the background colour indicates the company doing the renting, and the telephone number provides the contact information. The whose thing is stands out from the road below.
It's a simple, direct, highly efficient form of advertising with limited downsides: the banner is a micro eyesore; and in cultures where squatting is common (not sure if China applies) and seen as a problem it identifies the exact apartment that can be squatted.
Meanwhile we've spending then next two days on data analysis. Outside its already raining heavily and getting heavier - there's a chance that Typhoon Chanchu will hit our island. If it changes direction to Taiwan, we're in its path. Update: more info here.
Writing from Gulangyu Island | | Permalink
Caller ID
IP telephone kiosk.
Writing from Xiamen | May 16, 2006 | Permalink
Bottlenecks and Checks
After the train bombing on the 7th July there was some discussion in the UK about screening people and luggage travelling on trains. In China this is already standard procedure at mainline stations - luggage goes through an x-ray machine. In a country with relatively high incidence of pick-pocketing it's not surprising that the luggage is closely watched going into and emerging from the x-ray machine. It also serves as a convenient barrier for the authorities to check resident permits (although checks were not being carried out when this photo was taken). If identity cards are introduced as is currently discussed in the UK what are the physical bottlenecks where ID checks are likely to occur?
From a short stop in Xiamen station in an effort to understand local similarities and differences.
Writing from Xiamen | May 15, 2006 | Permalink
The Origins of History, The History of Origins
The costs required to start a business. Mobile phone seller pitching his wears from a small suitcase. From Karol Bagh Market, Delhi (above), traders checking out a second hand phone for sale in Chengdu (below) and a razor seller in Xiamen (bottom).
If these businesses become successful is there a stage in their development where they try to hide their (informal, market) past? As the company grows and (perhaps) becomes more anonymous and impersonal will the company try to emphasize its humble origins? How was your opinion of companies like Amazon, HP, Apple affected by knowing their origins? How accurate does the history need to be, from whose perspective? In what industries will people be motivated to validate the story they are given?. And as more recording devices are available to record tomorrow's history today, how will this affect the ability of companies to shape their own history? Same questions for individuals..
Related stories here, here, here and here.
Writing from Xiamen | | Comments (4) | Permalink
What Gets Delivered
Writing from Xiamen | May 14, 2006 | Permalink
Belief In Packaging
A similar level of expense for this cigarette packaging.
The process of buying cigarettes from this seller includes checking the quality of a cigarette to ensure its not a fake. Except that in the example above, it is.
Writing from Xiamen | | Comments (2) | Permalink
Packaging
The rich packaging experience of a suitcase 'sex shop' in a Xiamen street market. What does the style, perceived and actual costs of the design say about what's inside?
Related material here.
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Streets and Back Alleys
An investigation of the dense back alleys of one of the poorer and oldest districts of Xiamen. Prior to a massive investment in the 90's much of the city was like this and wandering around gives a sense both of once what was, and for many what still is. The area includes a sizeable red light district, though locally it's also called the 'sex-barber shop' district because many of the establishments front as hair dressers. As a friend pointed out, the scale of this industry is in part due to the sizeable immigrant population - families separated by work and lack of living permits. In the tight alleys the more aggressive ladies tug at shirts though most sit bored or playing cards. One lady waves her keys - an indication that an apartment is available nearby.
Mobile phone numbers are for many a fixed reference point in a moving world. How can we better serve the communication needs of the world's immigrant populations? What are their unique wants and needs?
Writing from Xiamen | May 13, 2006 | Permalink
Office Hours, Sounds and Daily Rhythm
This week's office is a weathered 1930's guesthouse on a Gulangyu Island situated off the coast of the South China. Sail a junk south west and you'ed soon arrive in Hong Kong. Taiwan is literally across the straits and the city Xiamen, where most of the field research is taking place, a mere five minutes commute by ferry. It takes 10 minutes to walk from the guesthouse through the maze of high walled back alleys that criss-cross Gulangyu Island to get to the ferry docks. The general ambience of the island is tropical colonial splendor let to stew in the sea air for a good few years and the villas and mansions that dot the island are in need of some serious maintainence. 75 years ago this was the foriegn enclave and in that respect its kind of fitting that its now our home and office base.
The guesthouse is spread over three stories and has sufficient space to accommodate the 5-strong research team, two live-in residents and a Chinese housekeeper. I'm occupying one of the two bedrooms on the top floor, typing this sitting in a mosquito netted four poster Chinese double bed. The room's furniture is much like the rest of the house - tiled floors, lots of dark wood, and a thread of red running through the blankets, blinds and many of the posters. Outside my door lies an expansive balcony with views over a large school, neighbouring villas and in the distance across the sea, Xiamen. The rainy season which was due to hit last week seems to have passed us by, though Tokyo seems to be getting its fair share this week.
Despite getting up at 5am this morning, I suspect I was not the earliest riser. Colleagues have travelled from very different time zones and I doubt their body clock's have properly recalibrated. Based on the last few days I'd guess in my absence that: by 6 am the birdsong would be in full swing; by 7:30 the the workmen renovating the massive and run down mansion next door would start drifting into work (though they are polite enough to avoid using the power tools until later; by 8 breakfast will be served on the balcony by the housekeeper - the event of which will coincide with an alarm clock sounding in the next room; by 8:30 am the next-door school would broadcast a jingle signaling to students that the morning exercise were about to start, the students then line up on the playing field and start to perform leg shakes, arm rotations and body twists to the sound of annotated music - a Chinese equivilent to swing-two-three-four, bend-two-three-four; and that during the rest of the day the rhythm of the school (or possibly the piano museum which is reputedly nearby) is signaled with short bursts of pre-recorded piano. The frequency and nature of the broadcast alert reminds me of home: the 5 o'clock alarm sounded at a factory somewhere near the apartment in Sakura Shin Machi; and the rhythm of three minutes of workout and one minute's rest at the kick-boxing dojo in Daikanyama.
But for now, enough with the writing, time to get some rest before the afternoon shift starts.
Writing from Gulangyu Island | | Permalink
Reversible Status
The signs for the top six apartments are revsersed - simple and itself reversable.
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Love Knows No Bounds
Obscure graffiti from a back alley in Xiamen, obscure in that this China and it's in English, and the writer looks like they are handy with a piece of chalk. An english teacher perhaps?
Writing from Xiamen | | Comments (1) | Permalink
A Very Simple Question
A little busy this week in Xiamen on a field study, so over to you to answer the friday pop-quiz.
Despite him being so open, friendly and photogenic why did I not interview him?
All the clues are in the photo, and the answer in the comments.
Writing from Gulangyu Island | May 12, 2006 | Comments (8) | Permalink
CCTV to Print
A local entrepreneur has hacked close circuit T.V. equipment to capture poor quality photos which are then printed and laminated. The prevalance of cheap used printing equipment and the means to grey-market refill ink cartridges supports this kind of micro-service.
Discussion about CCTV in China can get confusing - CCTV is state run television.
Writing from Gulangyu Island | | Permalink
Our Brand Perception
Local sports brand Li-Ning in so far as a population of 1.3 billion + can be considered local. On a scale this big, when is local really local?
Writing from Xiamen | | Permalink
Sight Norms
Cultural norms for eye tests - from Xiamen (above) and advertisement for, in Tokyo (below).
From sign maker's shop in Ho Chi Minh City, here.
Writing from Xiamen | May 11, 2006 | Permalink
Browse the Future Perfect archives by date or keyword