Bangalore Archives

Context, Understanding, Risk & Consequences

Nov 25, 2005 | 3 Comments

This photo taken last year from a street market in Bangalore. For me it highlights the importance of context in understanding.

Lets imagine you are wandering around the street market and are looking for a toilet - you see this building and being non-literate you don't understand any of the words written in Hindi or English on its walls (the issue is not this straight forward but bear with me).

Relying on what you see before you, ask yourself:
How sure are you that this is indeed a toilet?
What is the cost of walking into this building if it is not a toilet?
Indeed, what is cost of not trying?

In this context the cost may range from nothing, to some social embarrassment, to perhaps walking into the offices of the mustachioed local political candidate - whose wonderful mural is on the building. There may also be a cost in not going to the toilet, and there may be viable alternatives like peeing on a nearby tree. It all boils down to risk and the consequences of making the wrong decision.

The real world contains wonderfully rich cues that can be drawn upon to make the decision whether to go in, or not. In this context these cues include: the fact that there is a stream of men going in and out of the building alone; that there is a similar building with a picture of a woman next door; your sense of smell (trust me on this); perhaps even that you've used this kind of building before. You could even ask someone in the proximity.

For mobile phone user's the challenge is that the phone user interface lacks many of these rich cues. For non-literate users in particular the consequence of not being 100% confident of what will happen next can be too high to just experiment and explore. Choosing that right soft key may start the game application. But equally it could delete the application. Or maybe it makes an expensive phone call. Or changes the carrier settings. How do you know? And are you willing to take the risk to find out?

As mobile phones are held in the hands of the next billion users, with their very different cultural backgrounds, language skills, education, mental models and (user) experiences designers need to work hard to understand the issues of context, risk & consequences of these new users.

Location: India » Bangalore / India / Japan » Tokyo » Ebisu » back of

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.

Location: India » Ahmedabad / India » Bangalore / China » Beijing / China / China » Hangzhou / India / China » Ji Lin / Nepal » Kathmandu / India » Mumbai / Nepal / Nepal » Pokara / China » Shanghai / Japan » Tokyo

Simple Food

Nov 10, 2005

A simple, very sociable recipe.

Take one large Goffman and the stems of 6 Weegee and chop finely. Add to pan with a dash of Hiromix and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes stirring regularly. Add the leaf of 3 Kieslowski (preferably blue, but red or white Kieslowski will do just as fine).

Squeeze the juice of a Petroski in to a bowl and add the hand-crushed leaves of four Clark (the stem of Clark can be bitter, so make sure you only take the leaf). Pour/scoop the mixture into the pan, mix gently, and transfer the contents into oven proof dish. Finely grate one Norman and sprinkle on evenly. Cook in a pre-heated oven on gas mark 6 for 25 minutes or until it starts to turn a golden brown.

Remove from oven, serve and garnish with with a decorative sprig of Tufte.

To be enjoyed in the company of strangers, far away from home.

Any recommendations for desert?

(Photos from street research last year in Mumbai and Bangalore)

Location: India » Bangalore / India / Japan » Tokyo