Two Wheels Good
Documenting a city or country from a car is a bit like doing human behavioural research without ever leaving a laboratory - there is worthy stuff you can learn but IMHO you'll pretty soon reach the limitations of what's interesting. Yeah I know, unless of course the focus of your research is car culture itself. But mostly getting out there requires removing the barriers between you and the world around you. What's your excuse when a motorbike and local driver can be yours for as little as 5 Euro for half a day? And even if motorcycle taxi's don't exist in a city of your choice it is possible to engage regular motorbike drivers to engagte in a bit of moonlighting.
Photos from motor cycle field research in Shanghai above, Kampala, Tehran, Hue, Fujian Province and Ho Chi Minh City below.
So you think language an issue? Some of the most effective days spent researching from the back of a motorbike have been with a driver that doesn't speak a word of English/German/Japanese and likewise me struggling to get my tongue around Farsi/Vietnamese/Chinese/Lugandan. What makes for a good research ride? A driver who is sufficiently aware of the passenger but ultimately knows exactly what he can get away with on the road/pavement/cattle path; a comfy passenger seat; plenty of cc's; and ultimately someone who is not phased by requests to stop in wierd places; and ends up anticipating places and peoples of interest.
Pillion highlights from this past year?
Interviewing boda-boda (motorbike taxi) driver's in Uganda for a study of shared mobile phone use, and on one occasion speeding through Kampala sitting Tour de France cameraman style i.e. the wrong way round on the passenger seat trying to get a good shot of a colleague Indri conducting an eventually very successful interview. Trust in your driver is a wonderful thing, especially when near misses are only witnessed after the miss and the only practical alternative is blind panic.
Being baled out of a sticky street situation by a motorbike driver in Tehran who knew just when to come and rescue me from over inquisitive officials. Watching Ho Chi Minh City wake and commute to work - Vietnam is after all still a 2-wheeled culture. The morning included a stop for a double condensed milk coffee and spending the next 30 minutes gripping and tripping.
And finally a day in the mountains of Fujian Province listening to tunes and staring contentedly at the back of a plant pot helmetted rider, who later introduced me to his favourite barber. The size of rock falls that were common in that part of the world would have wiped us out no matter how much wickerware protection he was wearing.
Bargain hard, tip well, don't expect a helmet.
Writing from Tokyo | November 10, 2006 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Mobile Location Based Advertising
Mobile advertising From Shanghai (above), Sao Paulo, Ho Chi Minh City and Delhi (in sequence, below). If these vehicles and the majority of people are carrying connected high capacity devices what kind of services does this enable? What will be your criteria for judging whether to connect or not?
OK, technically the Delhi photo is announcing a funeral.
Writing from Tokyo | August 4, 2006 | Permalink
Street Refill
Ink refilling services in Ho Chi Minh City above and Delhi below.
Writing from Tokyo | July 29, 2006 | Permalink
Signs Articulating Cultural Norms.
The widest selection of Do Not ... signs for sale in Tokyu Hands are Do Not Use Your Mobile Phone, No Smoking and No Cameras. What does it say about Japanese society that they did not sell any signs for No Spitting, No Explosives, No Cooking or No Begging?
Custom sign painter's shop in Kampala below, similar services on offer in Ho Chi Minh City, Pokara, Nepal.
And finally - a reminder of the importance of context in understanding by thinking about signs in a Delhi marketplace.
Writing from Tokyo | July 10, 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
Do You Aspire To This?
Advertising for dental services in Lhasa (above) and Ho Chi Minh City (below). There are strong cultural differences for what makes a perfect body, but what about for teeth? What do the viewers of these advertisements aspire to? Do the aspirations differ? How?
Writing from Tokyo | June 7, 2006 | Permalink
Status Indicators
The degree to which condensed milk and coffee has mixed visible through glass. Drinking becomes a positive feedback loop - the taste and status of the drink is confirmed as coffee is drunk, and can be further stirred. Possible downside? Stirring is a one-way sweetening process. But does it need to be?
Observed from a watch-the-city-wake-up session in Ho Chi Minh City.
Writing from Tokyo | May 25, 2006 | Permalink
Placement of Objects During Transitions
Continuing on the loose theme of welcome mats - how does the transition between work/home, public/private differ between cultures and contexts? Given the range of possible locations where they could be left, why are the boat owner's shoes taken off and placed on the deck of the boat?
Obvious answers? Probably.
Worth asking? Definitely.
Writing from Tokyo | May 8, 2006 | Permalink
Indicators To What Goes On Inside
The skylines of Ho Chi Minh City - knowing what people do inside their homes by what you see outside their homes.
Writing from Shanghai | May 1, 2006 | Permalink
Flexibility, Adaptability
Entry buzzers for businesses (Covent Garden, above) and domestic residences (Ho Chi Minh City, below). Both show signs of being updated. If you look closely at the wall above you can see drills holes showing that the intercom has been recently replaced.
How frequently do occupants change? Which solution is more elegant? More flexible? Cost effective?
In a world where everyone has access to a personal communication device what role does the buzzer play?
Writing from Brighton | February 7, 2006 | Comments (6) | Permalink
Custom Electricity Socket Layout
It's easy to get used to the default format of everyday objects such as electricity sockets. From where you are sitting take a moment to look around you... what objects are less than perfect? What level of skill, and what degree of motivation is required to customise these everyday objects to your individual requirements?
Photo of work shop bench taken in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City.
Writing from Tokyo | January 19, 2006 | Permalink
Screen Polishing
One of those professions that I never knew existed - the hand polishing of CRT TV screens. How long before the shift to other display technologies kills this profession?
Have not yet come across a service for polishing mobile phone or iPod Nano screens, but why not?.
Writing from Back of Ebisu | January 12, 2006 | Comments (3) | Permalink
Over Specification
Writing from Tokyo | January 7, 2006 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Gaming Services
Location based services will use proximity interaction to identify users, and in some cases the implications of being in a particular place at a particular time or with a particular frequency will lead to 'rewards'. To what extent will location based services that rely on proximity interaction be gamed? By whom? By 2010 proxy-proximity interaction services will be available to carrry out proximity interactions on your behalf, much like the developing and selling of characters in online worlds today.
Hmm, will these kinds of scenarios will be covered in this book?
In research into what people carry, I spent time interviewing people about so-called 'loyalty cards'. A summary of their comments is that they had a vague perception that using the card provided 'benefits' but were mostly unable to articulate what the benefits were. It highlighted how easy, and with relatively little cost it is possible to get a (branded) card into a person's wallet and for it to be carried at least for a few weeks.
Writing from Tokyo | January 5, 2006 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Information At The Tips Of Your Fingers
Today her finger nail is a means of expression, decoration, drawing attention.
Finger nail decoration machines already exist to allow a customer to choose a design, then automatically decorate and dry those nails. Embedding digital information on those nails would be a relatively trivial step (though generating a critical mass of device to read what is on the nails is non-trivial). If you could store and communicate information through your finger nails what would you want to store and what would you want communicate? Is one kind of infomration more suited to thumbs or particular fingers than others? The number of digits is one natural parameter, combined with issues such as biting nails, locations where finger tips can and will end up, and how long users would expect a finger nail design to last before being refurbished offer interesting user interface possibilities and forms of interaction.
The broader issue is - what is possible without going down the routes of embedding technology under the skin, personal area networks or alternatives like bone induction?
Writing from Hokkaido | January 3, 2006 | Comments (1) | Permalink
Clues To What Goes On Inside
Start the day at 6am and cruise the city with motorbike driver looking trying to understand how the city wakes up. Yes, it is little late - early risers are mostly likely in the park Tai Chi-ing at 4am, but early enough to catch the rush hour. The driver is a strong silent type - over course of 5 hours he didn't speak one word, not that that was a problem with lots of non-verbal communication, smiles, a gentle squeeze on the shoulder and he would pull in to let me dismount. His charge? 20,000 Vietnamese Dong (1 Euro) per hour, plus breakfast and all the coffee he can drink.
Take a look over Ho Chi Minh City in particularly from one of the many raised bridges and you'll see row after row of aerials jutting up from the roof tops. Could aerials such as these be some form of interface between apartments and the surrounding environment? What level of effort would be required to reduce the total number of aerials and share from one source? What (social) tools required to to enable this assuming it is desireable. How will this change if its all arriving through an IP pipe?
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | December 30, 2005 | Comments (3) | Permalink
Game Availability
Most popular PC games are yours for 6,000 Vietnamese Dong (0.3 Euro) per CD. Catalogues in Vietnamese and English. Software compliations too.
Surprising number of people., four thus far, spotted playing N-Gage here - killing time lounging on motorbikes.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (2) | Permalink
Print Club
Local variation of print club. As with a number of the machines I've come across in China its basically a PC and a bubble jet printer. As with the DVD shop, customer browses catalog (in this case for choosing backdrop) notes down their preferences as a number on a scrap of paper.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Permalink
Clues To What Goes On Inside, Pre
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (1) | Permalink
This Is A Petrol Station
A petrol station stripped to its, ahem, pure essense. Fuel in jar, profile raised by placing on brick. Elegant and ubitquitous in HCMC. The fancy version, above, offers oil too.
The grandest petrol stations IMHO can be found in China - the massive and often brutal design of the physical structures dwarfing even the largest trucks that pull in.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (0) | Permalink
Versatile Properties
What percentage of the world's population wears some form of flip-flop?
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Permalink
Technology Leap Frog
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (0) | Permalink
Compound Security
Deposit box above with small and easily breakable lock. Two slips of paper with hand written signatures are folded and attached to the front and side of box making it easier to identify that the box has been tampered with.
Safe, below - the external battery hardly engenders trust.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | December 28, 2005 | Permalink
Recognise? Acknowledge?
Textures of a village stone mason workshop. Most of his work for head stones, but the odd clock mount and homage to Ho Chi Minh. Obvious pride in his work, including his carving of a topless flute player. Obvious level of skill shown in the detail of his work based on, um, close examination of his topless flute player.
With more of what is being produced and consumed being or becoming digital how do consumers (or peers) recognise and acknowledge the skills of digital craftmen and women? With the tools to publish, and easily re-publish work from others what is a suitable level of acknowledgement to associate what is produced with what is reproduced?
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | December 27, 2005 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Specialist Tools
The humble ear scraper/cotton bud replaced by an array of dedicated tools.
Gentleman demonstrated how to make one particular tool. Cut up to 1 cm edge off a razor blade and insert into the tip of a metal handle to become a tiny shank - was used to take a fine layer of skin from inside the ear. The experience was not wholly unpleasant - somewhat like being under local anesthetic and feeling the odd tug or pull on the skin, but not really knowing what is going on.
Somewhat surprising to see head torch join the range of electrical equipment.
Writing from Hue | | Permalink
Dual Properties
Writing from Hue | | Permalink
National Priorities
Every culture has an equivilent to this, its just a matter of figuring out what it is.
Above, Bird Flu street sign in Hue, Vietnam.
Below North Korean spy hotline on subway in Seoul, South Korea.
Writing from Hue | | Comments (2) | Permalink
Icon, Iconic
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | December 25, 2005 | Comments (0) | Permalink
What You See When You Travel Where You Travel
A street of sign makers in Ho Chi Minh City, 30,000 VND (2.6 Euro) and a couple of hours wait you can have pretty much any sign made to order. The shop itself offers insights into local (design) tastes, brands and concerns. Warning signs in particular highlight popular problem issues - based on the signs prepared for customers to this shop I'd say the top two issues are theft, and risk of electrocution from exposed power lines.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Permalink
Adapted Design
A logical progression from the number of motorbikes on the streets of HCMC. Workshop bench in a metal workshop made from motorcycle seat, somewhere in the suburbs close to the Chinese market. The pleasure of getting lost.
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Permalink
Suggested Parameters Of Use
Size very much based on local norms.
Ever wondered why business class seats are so wide?
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (4) | Permalink
Identity
Public interface identifying apartment person and/or family. Hints of corrective design
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | December 24, 2005 | Comments (0) | Permalink
What You See, When You're Looking Up
'
I'm standing in a doorway and looking out on the street - this neighbourhood is getting a side-swipe from a typhoon that's seriously ravaging more northerly parts of the country. There is some time to kill before the rain lets up enough to hop on the back of a motorcycle taxi and head back to the hotel. It's a doorway to a barber, masseur and hair-dressers, so why not? 30 minutes later the stubble is all gone, I'm totally relaxed, and in between drifting in and out of sleep I spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling (and trying not to look into the eyes of the rather attentive attendant).
A few years ago had the pleasure of lying flat on my back on a trolley being pushed around an Italian hospital. The time spent there involved a fair bit of anxiety - the result of a mountain, a snowboard too much speed and not enough skill. The medical staff were acting beyond the call of their volunteer duty (not even someone in full protective chemical gear should have had to unlace my old boarding boots after a day on the mountain. For the record RG - I've got new boots). After a lengthy drive down the mountain, the time spent in the hospital was being wheeled along corridors, from waiting rooms to x-ray room and back again, and again. Minor complications delayed my release so I had a lot of time to kill and incidentally it was the first time in my life that I actually felt I needed a mobile phone. Given the number of people lying horizontal for extended periods of time in this space, how can the ceiing be used to practically and/or spiritually re-assure, or even entertain patients?
Writing from Ho Chi Minh City | | Comments (1) | Permalink
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