Germany Archives
Audio Denial
May 16, 2008
This research malarkey is becoming geekier by the minute.
Collecting audio samples this week the sounds of a train platform in Tokyo above and ambient hotel corridor noise Helsinki below. Feels weird standing still for three minutes in a hotel corridor - them being transient spaces n' all. At 5am not a lot of stirring from within the rooms fortunately, but enough ambient noise to populate a scene from eraserhead or half life.
Tokyo boarding.
Power for the People
May 16, 2008
Frankfurt airport - laptop user's tastefully segregated from genpop.
(Smiley)
May 16, 2008
Sausage Bounce
May 16, 2008
A quick stopover in Frankfurt on the way home means: catching up with relatives via telephone - there's nothing like being within the same national boundaries to trigger a bit of (still remote) family bonding; stocking on top notch German dental products; finding time for a hefeweizen and a cheeky wurst.
Above - the Lufthansa lounge work spaces include these rather foreboding power sockets.
Ihre Meinung
Nov 20, 2007
Passengers clearing immigration in Frankfurt airport are given copious opportunity to feedback about the quality of service via this relatively lengthy form.
Jumping over to China - passengers arriving in Beijing airport can give immediate likert feedback on an electronic feedback tool - tricky to get a photo since its in Chinese immigration but very similar to this in the Gulangyu branch of the Bank of China.
For each mechanism: the motivation and satisfaction that comes from giving feedback; the extent that satisfaction is affected by immediacy; the likelihood that the feedback affects an outcome; and given that the opportunity to give feedback can engender the passenger with a degree of control, the extent to which the actual feedback is irrelevant i.e. the feedback mechanism is the message.
Japan immigration has just started photographing and fingerprinting foreign visitors. Welcome. Really.
Raised Awareness
Nov 20, 2007
This dental gel packaging includes braille - visible on the top part of the box. But why does braille appear on this product and not on their regular toothpaste? The gel should not be used more than wochentlich - once per week whereas the toothpastes on the same shelf are twice daily. Norms. Exceptions.
Leave colleagues in a German pharmacy for ten minutes and they buy up the shop. Also guilty as charged.
Formal / Informal
Nov 06, 2007
The re-designed First Direct site includes an un-bank like vocabulary in it's footer: "We're obsessive about the quality of our service, so we monitor or record calls to make sure everything's tickety boo." An extension of First Direct's branding of being an un-bank like bank.
A night's stopover in Frankfurt on the way to Accra - jetlag providing an opportunity to catch up (un-)banking admin.
Elevation to Art Form
Nov 17, 2006
The Heidelberg Montana graf shop somehow simultainiously at home and at odds with the twee surrounds of the old town. To what extent does the ability to see what other people have been doing in the same field, essentially comparison shopping legitimise the medium?
"Iranian grafitti?"
"..."
"Its all political isn't it?"
Indeed you might expect so.
Data Transmission Mechanisms
Nov 16, 2006
An intriguing keynote presentation by Oxford University's Dominic O'Brien of at the World Wireless Research Forum on using solid state lighting to transfer data. Background research and information can be found here. Essentially it turns a solid state light source such as an LED traffic light into data transmission mechanism.
For thousands of years people have used light sources for low data transmission mechanisms - whether its hilltop beacons to warn of an impending invasion, ship to ship morse code or more recently the extensive use of car head-lights and tail-lights in Tehran's car to car flirting culture. The inventive step is to increase the data rates, reduce error rates and get the base technology - LEDs down to a mass market price point.
Whilst its likely that most of the data transfer will be ambient - unnoticed by humans the inherent properties of the data delivery mechanism (a light source) and the simple fact that humans have built in senses to process light (eyes+) makes for a number of interesting applications. For example what kind of visual cues will indicate that that that light source is compatible with your device? The type of content that is being transferred? That the data transfer process has completed? How does today's use of light map to light + metadata tomorrow? A simple example is that whilst it takes you 0.5 seconds for you to notice that the car in front is indicating to turn right your car already noticed in 0.1 seconds. Extrapolate this to all the cars on a freeway during rush hour - each passing information on to the car in front, the car behind. Yes the car behind you is really a doctor on his way to an emergency.
In 2012 when you're flashed by the teens in the car behind are they telling you to get out of the way or trying to download tunes eminating from your sound system/rear indicators?
And what if anything does this have to do with the maclaim graf found in a Heidelberg alleyway above? Only that the medium can be the message and you shouldn't assume that the message will be friendly.
Infrastructure Covered
Nov 16, 2006 | 0 Comments
The inherent properties of infrastructure that support its blending into the background. The speed at which this transformation process occurs.
How does our awareness and appreciation of infrastructure (and the services it represents) change as what we perceive as infrastructure increasingly becomes mobile?
Relative Metrics of Success
Nov 16, 2006
Hard to figure out whom this advert is aimed at - its extolling the number of devices success of Bluetooth with a full page spread in the USA Today.
Whose Finger on the Trigger?
Nov 16, 2006 | 1 Comment
From Heidelberg above and by A1one in Tehran below. The universality of emotionally evocative content
Mobile Essentials
Mar 22, 2006 | 1 Comment
Presentation by Per Persson, Mikko Aarras, Petri Piippo & Tetsuya Yamamoto & myself to last year's Designing the User Experience conference can now be downloaded from here [2MB].
Slides include photo examples of how to think about carrying behaviours including Center of Gravity, Point of Reflection and the Range of Distribution. A conclusion? The easiest way to have nothing to forget is to have nothing to remember. Whilst you might be tempted to enterpret this as a form of Zen philosophy, it is actually more about the art of delegation.
Related research here and here.
Where People Carry Mobile Phones
Nov 17, 2005 | 2 Comments
Where do you carry your mobile phone? And how will this change if the phone were to adopt some of the functionality associated with other objects that you carry such as money and personal identity? (Both payment and ticketing are already available on handsets in Japan).
We've been conducting a series of studies to understand where people carry mobile phones and other mobile essentials. The original research was driven by a need to know to what extent people notice incoming communication and to what extent this was affected by where the device was carried. After all - the usefulness of a mobile phone is diminished if the user fails to notice that someone is calling. (For the record, we assume that the user wants control over whether or not to be notified in the first place - 24/7 connectivity is a discussion topic for later perhaps?) If you observe customers in a cafe for an hour one of the most frequent behaviours related to mobile phones, especially for women, is checking whether they have missed any incoming communication. User data on device location can support product designers for example helping them decide defaults speaker volume or lanyard placement.
My colleague Fumiko Ichikawa is today presenting the first fruit of this research in a paper entitled Where's the Phone - a Study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces (download pdf) at the Mobility 2005 conference in Guangzhou, China. This paper draws on data from the first 3 studies - Helsinki, New York and Milan. Whilst I was not present in the original study in Helsinki I managed to take part in the follow-ups studies including cultures as diverse as the US, Italy, South Korea, Japan, China and India. In the future we'll be publishing data for these other cultures and explore the issues related to the full range of mobile essentials (the paper above focusses on the mobile phone).
Where people carry things today is interesting enough. The ultimate goal of this design research is to predict how the primary carrying location might change according to issues like new features and form factors. (New form factors will be enabled by technologlical advances such as minaturisation, flexible components or new charging methods). The fun part is figuring how this will collide with and influence future social and cultural trends.
And finally, if you're wondering whether I travel the world just to run these studies the answer is no - the team tends to run the street surveys in conjunction with more in-depth user studies that are already going on - its a good way to utilize assistant down time, meet hundreds of local mobile phone users and get a feel for a culture.
Why do People Carry Mobile Phones?
Nov 11, 2005 | 1 Comment
Why do people carry phones?
Why do people carry what they carry?
And if we can understand why, how can we use this knowledge in the design of future products, applications and services?
Why people carry phones might seem like a rather basic question for someone who works for a mobile phone manufacturer, but the journey to try and understand the answer has been an interesting one.
A couple of years back I carried out a multi-cultural research project with Per Persson and a number of other colleagues to figure out what objects people consider to be essential when they leave home. We spent time studying 17 urban dwellers in San Francisco, Berlin and Shanghai and Tokyo with shadowing, home-interviews, plus 129 street interviews and numerous observation sessions. One of our screening criteria for in-depth subjects was that people had to own a mobile phone although during the screening process we made no assumptions about whether they considered the phone a necessity or not.
In the cultures we studied 3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone. Whilst this may seem obvious the interesting part of the study was in understanding the reasons why people considered these objects essential (largely survival, safety & security), why they were not always present (forgetting, awareness, making a conscious decision to be out of touch) and strategies people adopted to help them remember to take these objects. A lot of times money will be carried in a wallet or purse, but when it comes down to it, the money (cash and notes) are considered the essential objects before the other objects that are also contained there.
Some of the material from this study was presented in the DUX 2005 paper - 'Mobile Essentials - Field Study and Concepting' (download paper, 0.4mb). The paper introduces three interrelated ways to understand human behaviour to explain what we learned, and at some point I'll use Future Perfect to expand on some of these issues.
Firstly the Center of Gravity describes the most likely place where you are likely to cluster and consequently find these objects. In the home the Center of Gravity is likely to be the edge of a desk, a chair and often in the case of women, a bag. Objects don't stay in the center of gravity but over time they gravitate there.
The second idea is the Point of Reflection - the moment when leaving a space when you pause current activities turn back into an environment and check you have the mobile essentials. Typically this involves looking at the Center of Gravity, sometimes tapping pockets, sometimes speaking aloud. Not seeing the objects where they are supposed to be (the Center of Gravity) can be a sign that they are already carried.
The last behavioural concept is something we call the Range of Distribution - essentially the degree to which essential objects are likely to stray from the person, or from the person's line of sight/range of touch. Range of distribution is largely based on perceived risk of theft - the higher the perceived risk the further away objects are likely to be placed be allowed to 'stray'. This way of thinking about objects is important because the more likely an object is to be out of sight the more likely it is to be forgotten, and a mobile essential that is forgotten has little use in solving emergencies. In addition as mobile phones that take on functions associated with other mobile essentials for example access/identity (key, smart-card) or payment (money) can affect where and how they are carried.
As a private, relatively safe environment the home has a large range of distribution, whilst spaces like cafes or public transport have a relatively low range of distribution. The lowest range of distribution we observed was bus commuting in Shanghai rush-hour. The most extreme example of range of distribution was given to us by a vice cop in Berlin who explained about a drug dealer that double wrapped his produce which was then stored it his mouth - if the cops tried to bust them swallowed. Waiting for the produce to clear the digestive system was often too much hassle for low level busts, and was presumably rather unpleasant and messy.
Taxis are interesting environments in that they are often treated as a temporary private space - in which people can relax and objects are likely to spread out within the natural boundaries of the environment. When combined with other parameters such as: people using taxi's whilst tired or impaired e.g. drunk/high; the likelihood of using the mobile phone in the taxi; placing objects on the seat/out of sight after use; and a pressured sequence of tasks at the end of the journey such as thinking what to do next on arrival at the destination and paying the driver, help explain why mobile phones are often left in taxis.
There are naturally many other reasons why people carry a mobile phones - for entertainment, projecting status, a sense of belonging, or capturing and communicating an experiences using a camera phone to name a few, but the commonality was essentially their ability to help us survive.
Most people consider other objects essential - driver's license (particularly in the US), medication, travel pass and lip-stick are just some that have been mentioned but these can change over the course of the day and according to context. I would argue that nearly all objects that people carry are essential, because the carrier has already gone through a conscious and subconscious selection process to select those objects from all the objects they own or have access to. Nobody carries stuff just for the hell of it. Well actually that's not strictly true - many people carry things that they are not aware they are carrying - phones increasingly have features that the owner considers useful, is not aware are on the device. In these instances the smart question is what situations trigger initial awareness of a feature, and many researchers are working on contextual understanding in part to present the user with the right feature/knowledge at exactly the right time that it is useful.
The exceptions to why people don't carry these objects are in some ways more interesting than the fact they do in the first place. Designing solutions that meet a user needs are relatively easy, but for a product to be adopted into the flow of someone's life takes a good understanding of exceptions. Mobile essentials are often forgotten, despite the strategies for remembering. Keys are not necessarily needed if you live in an extended family or in areas of high unemployment. Some people like to 'switch off' and talk about quality time without the interruption of the mobile phone (I expect there to be different attitudes towards constant connectivity with younger generations). There is also the issue of at what point in a person's life they are entrusted to carry these essentials and in the case of children, if they are lost, who is responsible to replace them?
In one sense the easiest way never to ever forget anything ever again is to have nothing to remember. This is not as glib as it first sounds - it is possible to delegate responsibility to remembering to other people or indeed to technology. (The concept of delegating can be considered as a solution to many problems except entertainment and bodily functions).
A number of interesting avenues have come out of this research:
Why people make a conscious effort to leave mobile essentials behind and in the case of their mobile phone - switched off. This loosely comes under the heading connecting people, dis-connecting people, and re-connecting people.
My colleagues have initated a study of where people in Helsinki carry their phones and whether they notice incoming communication. A paper, drawing on data from follow up studies in Milan and New York will be presented at the Mobility Conference 2005 in Guangzhou China. (I'll post it when its available)
Another theme is the role of the phone in supporting and on occasion triggering personal crisis. Not life threatening events but things like being locked out of home, being lost late at night, breaking up with boyfriend/girlfriend and yes, mobile phone theft and loss. Notice the overlap between mobile essentials and personal crisis?.
TV & Mobile Fone
May 16, 2005
Mural in Kreuzberg, Berlin - mobile phone joins television as symbol of mindless consumerism.
Information & Location
May 14, 2005
This noticeboard outside a restaurant near Grunewald, Berlin plastered on both sides with motorbike related advertising. How does the reader know whether the advert is still valid and the object still for sale?
A,B,C,D,E,F ... Z
May 13, 2005
Get your education from the streets.
Top-ups Via Vending Machines
May 12, 2005
Top-up phone credit via vending machine. Remarkably graffiti-free for Berlin.
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