Ji Lin Archives
Medium/Message/China
Jan 26, 2009
For every message a medium. From Ji Lin City, China.
A pleasant Chinese New Year to all.
Communication, Literacy, Design
Aug 25, 2006
Remote communication requires a means of identifying whom to contact. How do people who can't read and write manage their contact information?
This is just one of the many questions I'll be asking at a presentation on Literacy, Communication, Design to the University of Art and Design Helsinki on the evening of the 14th September. It's hosted by Teemu Leinonen and Andrea Botero Cabrera and is open to the public. It will draw on three years of research by colleagues at the Nokia Mobile HCI Group into low literacy communication practices, a journey that took us from urban and rural India to Nepal, China, Uganda and beyond.
Related research can be found here and as usual when its all done and dusted links to the slides will be posted to here.
Cultures of Repair, Innovation
Jul 03, 2006 | 4 Comments
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.
Consumer Options
Mar 09, 2006 | 3 Comments
Four batteries for sale in China.
Covering a gamut of real consumer options: official Nokia; fake Nokia; premium non-Nokia - costs just below the official Nokia price but doesn't pretend to be official; and generic no-brand. Getting what you pay for? Getting what you perceive you pay for? Quality assurance? Risks?
Unexpected Behaviours
Dec 22, 2005
Cycling in Chinese cities I was frequently surprised by electric bicyles - the driver seated often with feet resting on pedals, but not pedaling, nor the sound of a motor, yet faster, silently and effortlessly drifting by.
What makes a bicycle a bicycle? Or a motorbike a motorbike? At what point do objects outgrow their original names? To what extent are new features, or the way we use an object constrained by its legacy features, expectations of how it should be used?
Non-Literate Mobile Phone Communication
Nov 20, 2005 | 1 Comment
To communicate with someone outside your immediate proximity requires at least 4 things: something to communicate; tools to create what you want to communicate; an infrastructure to carry the communication; and a means of identifying with whom to communicate. There are an estimated 799 million non-literate peoples world wide. If you can't read and write how do you manage your contacts?
This simple observation was the starting point to conduct a series of (ongoing) exploratory research studies in India, China and Nepal - our aim to understand the communication needs of non-literate users. For mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address these needs: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? Making and receiving calls? Creating and managing contact information? Text messaging? Using time management features? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?
If your interest is piqued then you might enjoy the following essay entitled Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication which explores these issues and proposes a number of possible design solutions. As with a lot of our work the original projects included a fair amount of concept development that is only touched on in this essay.
In the studies we spent time with non-literate users exploring, mapping and understanding the things they used and the tasks they wanted to achieve - from using washing machines to weighing scales to running motorbikes to re-tuning TVs to paying for things. How did they interact with objects with textual and numeric interfaces? What problems did they encounter? What strategies did they adopt to overcome these problems? Were these strategies successful? If not, why not? And how can we bring the knowledge from this research and apply it to create communication devices that are more in tune with our non-literate users?
Researching non-literate communication practices has been rewarding: it touches on a very basic human desire - to communicate across time and space; the potential payback for the research is obvious and non-trivial; and the study participants, collaboration partners and environments in which the research took place have been quite simply inspiring.
Photos taken from street research in Mumbia, Bangalore, 2004 & 2005.
Repair Culture China
Jul 02, 2005
The total cost of owning a product includes the risk it will break, and the cost and ease of repair if it does. Assuming it is out of warrantee, or that it even had a warrantee - grey market imports and used phones won't be covered. A feature of lower income consumers is that every yuan, rupee and cent counts - everything that helps the consumer shaves a few cents off the price will get mindshare.
Whilst in India Aditya pointed me into the direction of Delhi's thriving mobile phone sale and repair culture at Karol Bagh market, and with the help of colleagues been doing some follow up research here in JiLin. There are many shops clustered around Dong Shichang Market selling used mobile phones, and tucked into the back of most of these is a small repair counter typically staffed by the husband of the lady who owns the shop. Spent a little while exploring the user experience of getting a phone fixed through informal channels.
The choices for JiLin consumers with an out of warrantee product is to: buy a new phone (prohibitively for most people); go to the (official) Nokia Care shop; or take it to one of the repair guys. Of course to do this properly we needed a phone, broken. Bought a used Nokia 8850 for 250 RMB (18 Euro). The first shop we entered had a very friendly repair guy, who once he overcome his initial scepticism at our request and was happy to help out.
"I'd like you to break this phone display please"
"Um"
"But not smash it, more of a little crack"
"Er"
"And trash the speaker, as if its been dropped in the toilet"
He managed to disassemble, selectively break and then rebuild the phone in less than 5 minutes. And then out to the next shops to get it repaired...
Side note: Wishing I had bought The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid with me for a re-read but the hard back is just too bulky to lug everywhere. Reading a PDF on a laptop is about as enjoyable as waiting for XP to boot.
Recycle
Jun 20, 2005
The second hand phone market in Ji Lin city is a history lesson in phone design, covering everything from the original brick-like Motorolas & Nokias to more recent 3G offerings.
This 8850, 2nd or 3rd hand, with non-Nokia battery but otherwise perfect working order - 250 Yuan (22 Euro). One happy new owner.
OS supports Malaysian so presume its a grey market import from there. Phone memory contains list of previous owners contacts. The volume of data & content stored on phones is growing. What will future shoppers discover on their 2nd hard purchases?
Finding Rhythm
Jun 07, 2005
Running a user study in JiLin City. The plan is to meet the team at Beijing Terminal 1, though the red eye from Helsinki means a 3 hour stopover before the connecting flight. The only beds in the airport come with a massage, so book back to back sessions and doze. Take the opportunity to recharge various gadgets whilst she pummels my back.
Eventually the other team members arrive. We've traveled from 3 different research sites - Helsinki, Beijing and Tokyo. Inauspicious start to the study - the connecting flight is canceled so everyone shifts to alternatives.
Intensive research studies are a unique opportunity: 10 days for the team to gather, descend on a city to collect and synthesize as much data on our research topic as possible. The plan is to run 1 qualitative study and 2 quantitative studies simultaneously. Mission control is a hotel suite which over which is already looking like, um, mission control. We need all available wall space for hanging incoming data, so photo-frames with fetching floral scenes are removed and in one case replaced by a white board. The rest of the space is controlled chaos - cameras charging, laptops buzzing, the printer churning out photos.
Understanding the city helps us put the study participant data into perspective. Every city has some kind of rhythm, and the first challenge for the team is to simultaneously synchronise time-zone challenged selves with the rhythm of the city. Anyone traveling long distance is encouraged to arrive in the timezone a few days early and take a couple of days vacation - everybody wins with this arrangement.
Three tips for getting to know a city quickly: buy a bicycle and use it to cover as much ground as possible; dismount and interact with as many research-topic relevant people as possible; go clubbing; find time to wake up when the city wakes up (typically not after a night's clubbing).
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