Posted by Jan at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

Corrected Error

A simple error to make.

[updated: photo below makes it easier to spot]

Posted by Jan at 08:58 PM | Comments (3)

Man (Wearing Adidas) Sprints to Save Child From Car

Will the reporting of unfortunate but everyday events such as car accidents be affected by having easier access to more detailed information on what the victim or rescuers were wearing and carrying?

Today, passive advertising such as Samsung Mobile above, is ubiquitous. In an world where say, clothing monitors the wearer's vital signs is combined with the availability of accurate location information, a tool for ambient wireless communication and the ability to prioritize the newsworthiness of micro events (either retroactively or in real time) provide sufficient information to automatically generate the outline for a press release? Would Adidas want to spin 'Man Wearing Adidas Sprints to Save Child From Car'?

Fickle stuff. More interesting - will insurance scams be more difficult to pull off?

Posted by Jan at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2006

Dare, Counter Dare

"This is a Dare drug free school zone"
"Dare to think for yourself"

Posted by Jan at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Unlikely Symbols of Power

Pilgrims on their circuit of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa walking past an innocent looking plastic table.

Why a symbol of power? This is where the police sit.

Posted by Jan at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

The Wedding Planner

And his heroes (below).

Photos from a row of wedding shops on the outskirts of Delhi. His job was to trick out the wedding carts for the wedding procession - example shown in the background.

Posted by Jan at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2006

To Hack Me Is To Love Me

To run a light in an alleyway outside his shop this Delhi resident simply taps into the public power supply (junction box hidden at the top of the photo).

What is to stop people from doing the same with all future 'utilities' - whether it is digital storage space, connectivity or downloading content from a as-much-as-you-can-eat subscription account? What level of leakage is privately acceptable for these modern day utility companies? And in what situations is this form of hacking beneficial to both parties?

Posted by Jan at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2006

When Everyone Finds Their Rhythm

Reviewing photos taken in the last month came across one that evokes many postive feelings.

It shows two of our team sitting in garden in our hotel/guesthouse in Delhi, my laptop is in the foreground and I'm sitting with my back to a tree. It must be around 7:30 am and the city heat has yet to descend. Despite having all the windows open the lack of breezes and the mosquito nets meant that at this moment the guesthouse is somewhat stuffy (though by 9am it will be cooler inside the building than outside). They are both wearing headsets plugged into laptops and are transcribing the previous days interviews. I'm not sure exactly how long they've been up or what time they slept but they were working when I awoke. We'd all been chucked out of the breakfast room by the housekeeper who was eager to set the table.

And the positivity? A mixture of coming together in a flexible and condusive space, seeing old friends, having a common, agreed and understood purpose, everyone getting on with the job without having to be asked, and everyone working within the boundaries of their own rhythm (a couple of the team were still asleep but then they'd been working late). Sometimes the jetlag can play havok with getting the job done, but this time everyone synced just fine.

It also reminds me how sterile regular corporate approved hotels can be.

Posted by Jan at 07:53 PM | Comments (1)

April 19, 2006

Attention To Detail

Ash-tray in cafe somewhere around the back of Harajuku - text says 'Caution', small print says 'Smoking may cause your nasel hair to grow'. This level of attention to design details is fairly common in Japan.

Posted by Jan at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

Coping With Shared Use

Shop owner in South Delhi limits employee access to his land line phone. Similar solution used at a security checkpoint in Lhasa.

For devices that are shared, hold private information and can incur costs for use, like um, mobile phones how to restict access to features?

Posted by Jan at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

Micro Breaks, Macro Breaks

A security guard settling into another hour seated in front of a closed store in South Delhi (above), motorcyclist checking text messages whilst smoking a cigarette in Tokyo (below) and a bus stop indicating how long before the next bus arrives, Brighton (end photo).

Micro and macro breaks are the time we have between defined tasks: waiting for a bus to arrive; for a traffic light to change; for friends to turn up; to smoke a cigarette (assuming the act of smoking is not seen as a primary task). If you design mobile devices, applications or services you should be interested in micro and macro breaks - as a commonly carried mobile essential there is a fair chance that the mobile phone will be used during that break.

Not all all breaks are equal: some are planned, some not; the ability to predict how long a break will last affects how the time is used and whether tasks are started; some we have degree of control over how long they last; and the contexts in which breaks occur can vary considerably - just think of the range of situations you find yourself in.

What are the characteristics of micro or macro breaks? How do they differ between cultures? For that matter, how does the pace of life, the perception of time and how it 'should' be filled differ between cultures? How long do these breaks last compared the time it takes to complete a task such as sending a text message, locating information on a mobile web site or to go to a more topical application - tuning into signal for a mobile TV station?

And why the bus stop? Quite simply - knowing when the break will finish affects what tasks will be started.

Posted by Jan at 08:03 PM | Comments (1)

The Half-Life of Food on a Plate

Back home for a few days.

An observation from a recent meal with friends - as dishes arrive there is a polite free-for-all for food until that is, there is only one portion left on each plate. The final portion of each dish has a half-life - with no-one (obviously) willing to take the whole portion.

Posted by Jan at 06:14 PM | Comments (3)

April 18, 2006

Understanding Consequences, Affecting Actions

Graffiti/sign stencilled close to many of drains in Hilo make it harder to ignore/easier to understand the consequence of inappropriate dumping.

Fast forward, same situation, but what happens when there are numerous objects embedded with a life-time's worth of data; being able to identify (or partially identify) a person has been in proximity of that drain at a particular time; a framework of legal/social rules; and the ability to display dynamic signs based on that legal/social framework? Pro-active contextual street signage?

It's not a million miles from a real-time equivilent of this.

Given that some of the fun of life is in ignoring the (increased risk of the) consequences of some of our actions whether it's smoking (whatever), extreme sports or simply crossing the road, how will this play out when the consequences of actions can be calcuated and projected to a person in real time? There are likely to be signficant cultural differences - in terms of issues like the respect for authority and the extent to which people take a fatalistic attitude to life.

Posted by Jan at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2006

Effort Required to Help People Wayfind

How much effort to help people find their way? The consequence of not making the effort?

Marking trails at 3000+ meter altitude (Mauna Loa, above). Or directing people to a nearby toilet.

Posted by Jan at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

Anti-Social Luggage

I'm intrigued about the affects physical/digital objects can have on other physical/digital objects during everyday use. We know from multi-cultural studies on what people carry where and why that people tend to keep keys and phones in separate pockets to avoid scratching the device (this applies mostly to men, our research indicates that women are much more likely to use handbags than pockets to carry their mobiles).

What happens to other carried objects or carrying spaces such as pockets when a device is covered in gem stones? Or is defiant about being put in your pocket?

What happens to other people's luggage when a skateboard slip-mat is applied to the surface of your check-in luggage? (photo, above). How will it differ when the anti-social behaviour is digital?

Posted by Jan at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

Adult Content, Other Grey Market Goods & Services

The availability of adult content is restricted in China. But what does this have to do with these women standing on the side of a busy Beijing road during last December's bitter cold?

In Beijing a woman in a market street holding a baby is associated by many with selling pornography. (The seated lady in the photo above is holding a baby and has a CD visible in her hand). Pornography sellers have even been known to carry fake babies since the baby is the signifier of the goods that are for sale. I've not gone out of my way to research this topic but my assumption is that is applies to other parts of China also - a clarification from Chinese residents welcome.

Every culture has goods and services that are considered illegal, or at the very least anti-social. For consumers wishing to buy adult content or for that matter any grey or black market services, how to identify who is selling what? What is the risk of making the wrong assumptions? The transaction process is may be made more difficult through a high turn over sellers (if they are frequently busted by the authorities), the degree to which any transactions needs to be shielded from prying eyes, and the risk that the seller is in fact working for the authorities.

What lessons can we apply to the distribution of legal content? On the assumption that all stratas of society are consumers of these goods and services, how long before marketers seek to distribute advertising content through these channels? Apart from flyposting, any examples of it having happened already?

Posted by Jan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2006

Buying Fakes With Eyes Open

Observed during a short visit to a street market in Delhi - the seated gentlemen is boxing up covers for Nokia phones.

The quality of the covers varied but the boxes were pretty obvious fakes. On the assumption that most consumers in this market will be aware are of the origin of the goods, to what extent do (fake) boxes increase the value of (fake) covers? Are there markets where taking objects out of packaging increases their value?

Hmm, what makes a fake a fake?

Posted by Jan at 10:32 PM | Comments (3)

Content Middle Men

In Delhi's Karol Bagh Market 100+ Rupees (2+ Euro) will buy you as much content as you can fit on a 512 MB memory card. Widely available digital contents includes the usual suspects: ring tones in various formats; wallpapers; themes; applications; games - including Series 60 ports of many popular Nintendo ES games; Hindi pop videos; and a couple of full length Hindi movies. Given that most of this content is available somewhere online, its interesting to note the presence of someone who takes the time to find and package the material for less networked (or less network-motivated) consumers.

Posted by Jan at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2006

What You See, Are Allowed to See

You are doing ad-hoc field data collection - what are you really seeing when you see what you see? And how much of the (data collecting) situation exists because of your presence? And given the positive and negative biases that your presence has, how can you reduce their impact?

Taking the most recent field study in Delhi as an example - being an obvious foreigner made it easier to gain access to people to a number of situations, but I'm well aware that almost all of the street interviews that I took part in only involved male participants - introducing a gender bias to my data. Gender mixed field study teams is a basic requirement, but even with a gender mixed team there are biases such as what data is given what prominence in the final report which is affected by who the primary authors are which goes back to who has what access to collecting what data?

if you study a topic such as what people carry eventually you'll come in contact with grey market activities - which given the nature of the grey market provides a number of opportunities to introduce data biase. I recall a recent street interview where the conversation veered to anti-social activities and whether I was an undercover cop - the participant pushed the convesation to this topic by first suggesting that I could be the police, then reaching the conclusion herself that I was not. At this point I tried to argue that I could be the police - the conversation went something along the lines of [her] you're not the police [me] how do you know? [her] you don't dress like the police [me] yeah, but you can't really be sure? In the event (I assume) she assumed I was not the police because the conversation and her manner was open. But ultimately was it? And whilst there is a good deal of literature on why and how we affect the data that is collected, in the field it sometimes comes down to making a judgment call, ideally with biases discussed by the team and factored in during the data analysis.

And why these photos? To work effectively the telescopes on Mauna Kea require support from Big Island residents - the use of orange low impact sodium street lighting which, like our biases, can be filtered out (in this case by the telescopes). The end result is a clear view of the night sky.

I'm in the planning process for a field study in a highly gender segregated culture later this year, and wondering how best to approach ad-hoc street data collection, if at all. Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

Posted by Jan at 11:38 PM | Comments (2)

Authority

Whether you believe the sign depends on a number of things including: the authority of the organisation or person that placed it there; the context (cloud covered mountain roads); and the risk of it happening to you (running into a cow with a car). It's rare to find humour in warning signs but it works well here. Do you believe?

Posted by Jan at 03:59 AM | Comments (0)

Map To Rest Room

How you get from here to there.

Posted by Jan at 03:45 AM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006

Correlation

Mental, physical and spatial mapping.

Posted by Jan at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

Minimalism

Testing a car stereo's CD drives to hear it works - photo of a street stall in Delhi. Minimalism of both the CD drive and the plug. A relatively common alternative to sticking bare wire ends in the socket is to support the wire position with short pieces of wood.

Posted by Jan at 05:17 AM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2006

What You Are Likely To Forget

Sign to correct a common problem.

Got a few days R & R - the plan is to hit the trail for the next few days, assuming the weather lets up.

Posted by Jan at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

Your Rights Are Irrelevant. If Anything, Demand Trust

A sign that reads: "Can you keep an eye on our workers to stop them stealing?" would not go down that well in this Delhi coffee shop - yet this is basically what this sign says. Another example of using customers as a resource.

Posted by Jan at 08:20 PM | Comments (2)

April 11, 2006

Inviting Interaction

The extent to which spaces, places and technologies welcome interaction and use.

Posted by Jan at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2006

Socket Plus?

Are there any advantages to influencing use behaviour by promoting the use of one socket over another? What factors could influence which socket was used first?

Posted by Jan at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2006

Larger Small Print

Long queues to clear security checks at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport providing plenty of time for looking around and passenger watching. Due to the size of the sign the small print on the advertisement on the left is relatively large and noticeable - *conditions apply and *only in Delhi departure.

Four trends that might affect how this plays out in the future perfect: the increase of advertising across digital medium is not constrained by physical limits and provides greater scope for more small print; more people will carry personal devices capable of accessing related information; an increased quality of search engines to help you track down just what you are looking for; and an aging demographic with poorer eyesight demanding alternatives to today's small print.

Are more informed consumers better off? An opportunity to increase consumer understanding assumes that all parties benefit from having informed consumers - whereas in the real world conflicts abound.

Posted by Jan at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

It's Easy Getting Objects Carried

Like many shops in Delhi the Rama Color photo studio in Bengali Market uses advertising handouts to get their logo carried and displayed by their customers. One side of the advertisement depicts a god and the other side a calendar. During wallet mapping studies I'm often surprised at the ease by which people accept objects which are then carried, at least until the next time the wallet is cleared out. One of the most prevalent of these objects in modern urban centers is the buy-10-get-one-free coffee 'loyalty' card, but in India if the religious depiction doesn't grab a person's attention then the calendar will. It's not even the functionality that draws people to take the object, but the perceived functionality - the fact that it might be useful and that it's, well, free.

At what point is it economically feasible for stores to give away, by today's standards, richer more complex objects? Electronic flyers for example. To be picked up in the first place one thing will remain the same - they object will have a perceived functionality. What will be different is that they can act independently - designed to take advantage of the proximity of being placed in someone's purse, pocket, handbag or wallet to collect and report proximity data. To some people the physical space of your wallet will be just another real-time commercial battleground. Knowing what you have in there and how frequently you use is valuable data - disabling the opponent in whatever way will be a bonus. Its tempting to use the word Trojan or parasite, but by being self-sustaining and self-maintaining a self-reporting free-bee is more accurate.

And in a world where this is widespread how will this affect what we decide to pick up?

Posted by Jan at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)

Motivations for Ranking

[Corrected] Coaching institute in South Delhi publicises the students that have excelled on a billboard outside the school. The effort required to put up a printed billboard suggests that the ranking will be valid for a long period of time. In an increasingly real-time world what is a meaningful way of ranking people, events or other statistics?

This reminds me of two things: Awards are generally given out by people who like to be seen to be giving out awards to people who like to be seen receiving awards; and the easiest way to get an award is to first set up an award ceremony - what goes around will eventually comes around.

Posted by Jan at 11:38 PM | Comments (3)

Decompression

Two days in a rural location to analyse and debate 8 days of field data before the team disperses. A big part of coping with urban Delhi is dealing with the heat, noise and dust. Time for reflection with the team is in one location is a necessity and we make the most of what we have - the quiet space should ease decompression.

The glow on the left of the photo shows the distant Delhi light leaking into the sky. And the ghostly figures? The field research team on a 30 second exposure whilst our hosts sleep. The nights offered some respite from the intense day time heat.

Posted by Jan at 10:55 PM | Comments (1)

April 08, 2006

Cultural Conversions

Chai house worker wearing LIVESTRONG bracelets, somethings which were spotted on a number of young males around Delhi. The rubber bracelets are good triggers for charitable donations in part because they are so cheap to produce - more of the donation can go to the charity. This same property makes the statement-bracelet trend viable in highly price/cost cultures such as India.

Whether the intentions of the original statement for these bracelets is relevant to the wearer is another matter entirely. To what extent does the additional cultural distance travelled change the message?

Posted by Jan at 11:53 PM | Comments (1)

Components Stripped and Re-used

The degree to which used and damaged individual components are stripped for repair and re-sale.

Car stereos above.
Car, below.

Posted by Jan at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

Protect To Serve

Posted by Jan at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2006

Events Which

Demonstration in Delhi recorded by the demonstrators.

What consequences of the widespread availability of media gathering and reporting tools.

Posted by Jan at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

Local Insights, Insights from Locals

Being local doesn't qualify someone to be a local guide. Being a foreigner doesn't dis-qualify someone from having insights into a local culture. Something that enables a decent specialist to be able to specialise (and, um, be, er, special) is their ability to apply their expertise and work effectively in foreign contexts. And some specialists are ultimately not that special.

With these provisos in mind it's fair to say that our ability to gather meaningful data in foreign climes is dependent on having good local guides. The most obvious reason to hire guides is to provide cultural insights enterpret the local language. Less obviously a good local guide will use her social network to find appropriate study participants (when not using a recruiting agency); will know where to find what you want and negociate decent prices on anything and everything; makes the team aware of local sensitivities such as how to behave during meetings and where not to point the soles of your feet; dealing with local nuances such as power cuts; and even such simple but moral boosting things as knowing a decent neighbourhood restaurant. Also, in situations where gender is a barrier to gathering data having someone of the opposite sex around provides more options which ultimately leads to more data gathering opportunities.

Much like the rest of us, guides need a clearly described brief to be able to perform well. Given that the brief often changes as the project progresses we make an effort to keep everyone in the loop regarding the range and quality of the data that is being collected. It's worth bearing in mind that asking questions can be seen as a strength or weakness depending on issues as cultural norms, age and the personality of the individuals and that positive and negative feedback can be enterpreted in a number of ways.

Thanks to our cultural guides this past week: Priyanka, Smriiti, Aashish, Samir and Surbee - your insights were much appreciated.

Posted by Jan at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

Faith In

Posted by Jan at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

Slabs of Joy

A shop selling game controllers to hook up to TV based consoles - designed for arcade use.

Example of use here.

Posted by Jan at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2006

A Sufficiently Focused Group

Lo-tech setup for home based focus group - a wire connecting the video camera with the TV in the observation room. The space used for the focus group is normally someone's home, and in this instance the observation room is a converted bedroom - there are no seats so the observation team is perched on the edges of a large double bed. The setup works surprisingly well, with the participants relaxed in the surroundings and the proceedings sufficiently focused.

A backup battery sits in one corner of the home a sign that they are used to having power cuts. The host informs us that if the power does go for any length of time then the TV in the observation room will cut off, and given that it is a windowless room presumably we will be plunged into darkness.

But for once I'm able to say I spent a half day lounging around on a bed (there were no chairs), sipping tea and watching (the participants on the) TV and all in the name of work.

Posted by Jan at 05:36 PM | Comments (2)

April 04, 2006

Privacy Lost, Never Had, A Sham

Public call office receipts litter the street in front of a shop. These receipts typically include information relating to the call - the phone number, time, duration and cost of call.

Posted by Jan at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

Same But Different

Posted by Jan at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

Clean Teeth

Sticks for cleaning teeth/chewing, sold to very low income workers close to Old Delhi station.

Photos from a watching-the-city-waking-up street walking session.

Posted by Jan at 02:49 PM | Comments (2)

Media Delivery

Newspapers delivered over the last meters by throwing, a practice similar in the US.

In the UK newspapers are mostly delivered directly into a home mail box. Why the difference in delivery styles between these cultures? Factors include: the risk of theft; the perceived value of the papers; the size of properties and the location of the mail box on the property; whether gates are locked; the size of mail boxes; the size of papers; a culture of putting other things in the mail box? The risk of being rained on does not appear to be a factor - Seattle probably gets a similar amount of rain to many parts of the UK.

This gentleman managed to throw the paper into a tree. Is throwing efficient? For whom?

Posted by Jan at 12:34 PM | Comments (2)

April 03, 2006

(Out of the) Out-of-Office

We've set up a mobile office here in Delhi, but this afternoon's office is, well, out of the out-of-office. I'm perched on the edge of a street stall in South Delhi sipping hot sweet chai. A black and white TV is balanced on a high shelf and is blaring out a Harry Potter movie in Hindi. On my left the owner takes a pot of the boil and pours chai into 6 glasses - one of which ends up in my hands. Two rows of customers, mostly children, line the walls and most are intently watching the movies. They don't appear to be drinking anything.

The chai is pleasant enough, but if I'm honest I don't actually want or need it. The same can be said of a number of purchases today - the chai before this and the chai before that. I also didn't need the haircut, the shave, the picture frames, stickers, manuals, pens and a multitude of other things that were bought at various stalls in this neighbourhood market. But what all these things have in common is that they enable me to slow down social interactions to the point where an ad-hoc interview can take place.

Posted by Jan at 08:43 PM | Comments (2)

Out of Office Reply

The door to the office of an advocate includes both his mobile and residential numbers.

How easy is it to provide contextual information to deal with being out-of-office? In what situations is it useful?

Posted by Jan at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

How India Wakes Up

What percentage of the world's population wakes up to a phone alarm clock?

The advertisement for a Nokia 1600 and 1110 phones above focuses on a single feature - a talking alarm and clock. Jaago India Jaago translates to 'wake up India'.

Posted by Jan at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

Aspect Ratio

Three urinals to one squat.

Posted by Jan at 05:38 AM | Comments (0)

How (Parts of) Delhi Wake Up

An attempt to understand the flow of the city. Team has a 6am start. The streets are already buzzing.

Posted by Jan at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2006

Conversion

"Old currency changed here"

In cultures with grey and black markets for currency gullible tourists can be fooled into changing money for out-of-date local currency. Where? Well from personal experience, the Czech Republic.

How will this kind of scam play out as objects contain more meta data (such as sell by dates) and the life of those objects becomes more traceable?

Posted by Jan at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

Motivation to Protect

High quality cover for mobile phone to protect against damage and to a lesser extent dust.

From most angles the phone's appearance is similar with and without this transparent cover with the exception shown above. Beyond reducing the risk damage what are the motivations to use covers? To what extent does this choice boil down to appearance now vs. appearance later?

Posted by Jan at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2006

Do, And What You Do

The style of holding the money and tickets is both practical (change lined up for customers) and a visual symbol of his role (bus conductor).

Posted by Jan at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2006

Office Away From The Office

My office for the next two weeks is a townhouse /guesthouse close to Delhi's CP. The house is owned by an English couple who now spend most of their time on an estate just outside Delhi, and its current occupants are the 5 members of our research team plus the Nepali housekeeper and her family. It is welcoming, comfortable and coincidentally very, very English (including little touches like afternoon tea).

It's 5am as I write this and the first strains of sun light are peeking through the expansive mosquito screen and beyond that the canopy of a tree on the front lawn of the house. My body clock is halfway between Tokyo and New Delhi which according to the Windows time zone application puts me somewhere near Krasnoyarsk. The fresh morning air drifts through the house accompanied by bird-song and the distant but frequent sound of trains shunting along to Old Delhi station.

So what are we doing here? The fixed part of the plan is to run a series of focus groups to understand the pros and cons of various concepts. As with a lot of these studies the contextual work that happens around the edges is expected to also yield rich data - observing and documenting the contexts in which the concepts will be used, contextual interviews, and exploring themes such as rituals, customisation, repair cultures, coping with dust and dirt as well as generally trying to understand what both unique and the same about the Indian (communications) context.

The guesthouse is a conducive space to running this kind of study: the expansive and airy lounge can comfortably cope with the team and our 5 assistants (and at night a mattress is rolled out in one corner's it becomes my bedroom). A researcher from Hyderabad is asleep in the master bedroom which is now doubling up as mission control and the mobile office is unpacked and the walls are starting to be covered with data, schedules, photos and sketches of new design iterations. Further along the corridor are the sleeping bodies of a Canadian concept designer living in Helsinki and a Chinese colleague from, um, China whilst the final member of the team - an Indian studying in Helsinki is housed in a room on the roof of this one story building. In a choice between a regular corporate hotel with all mod-cons and this guesthouse with shared living quarters I'd take this any day. There are numerous benefits from having the entire team stay in one space - the net result of which is that we live, eat and sleep the research topic for the duration of our stay (and having access to a housekeeper makes life easier too).

6:30, the newspapers have just landed on the path and the house begins to wake.

Posted by Jan at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

Game Play

The range of motion of hands shown by the dirt-scraped clean areas.

Is it possible to conduct accurate, longitudinal hand-placement usability tests using dirt as a boundary marker?

The weight of the TV is a counter balance to the pressure exerted on the buttons and joystick.

Posted by Jan at 09:02 PM | Comments (1)

Custom

Repeatedly self-customised phone by Fiza Khan a student at NIFT Delhi's Department of Fashion and Lifestyle Accessories.

To what extent does the customisation of a product or service facilitate or become a barrier to and ongoing customisation?

Posted by Jan at 06:32 AM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2006

Wear and Tear

Supple skin on the hands of a South Delhi barber. The shaving process included a face massage and the liberal application of raw aloe.

Dead skin on the hand of a rickshaw driver - his other hand was similarly worn in the same place.

Posted by Jan at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

Not in Here, But Out There

Thursday's presentation about field research to the Department of Fashion & Lifestyle Accessories at the New Delhi Institiute for Fashion Technology. Hosted by Associate Professor Bhawna Vij Katyal. Slides can be downloaded from here [3MB]. Update: link to the presentation now works

A summary?
Get out the lab.
Keep your eyes peeled.
Question eveything, including why you need to be out of the lab.
Stay warm.

Posted by Jan at 12:21 PM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2006

On Getting There

Can't think of a city that isn't beautiful to cruise around at night. Window down, non-spoken communication with the driver and the night-air blowing away hours of jet-fug.

From Delhi Airport to deep sleep in the guesthouse in less than an hour.

Posted by Jan at 03:24 AM

March 27, 2006

One-Way Conversation

Sign in Narita airport's Terminal 2 reads "We accept US$. But we can do the only bills (no coins). And change will be Japanese Yen"

Are there any benefits for the provider of (digital) services in offering two way conversions? (In this case offering change in either currency)

Posted by Jan at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2006

Secrets (But Not Lies)

I know you have a secret.

But don't worry I won't tell, but I just wanted to let you know that I know. That's enough.

During in-depth interviews into what people carry a sub-theme that sometimes emerges is the issue of privacy and secrecy - the things people carry that they don't want to reveal to others. They can be physical objects but increasingly they come in the form of electronic data.

Why would anyone tell a researcher about the secret things they carry? In the street interview context participants consider themselves anonymous (and we preserve this anonymity); they may not think through the consequences of what they are saying - which might be fine for an investigative journalist but can put a corporate researcher on the spot; it may be that the reward for revealing this information now is greater that the perceived consequences of having revealed it to the wrong person later (we work hard not to put people in this situation but it has been done); sometimes people don't know what they've revealed or reveal by accident; but more often than not the risk of revealing information to me, that is someone who is 'neutral' and not an authority figure, is low.

There are different levels of privacy and secrecy - a medical condition may be considered secret from everyone including close family; but other things that are only secret within the work context. I expect to see more human behaviours shielding secrets from the sensors that surround us. A kind-of example of this arose in a study a couple of yeas ago. A participant knew that by default a particular communication channel was being recorded, and being about to do something that was not strictly adhering to the rules (but not necessarily breaking them either) pushed some of her communication through alternative channels. Which raises a number of questions on one side regarding legal obligations and on the other the obligation to say whether the alternatives themselves are being recorded.

How does all this affect how people carry what they carry? In subtle ways. Frequent use objects such as bicycle keys during a day shopping in town are more likely to be carried in a separate pocket to secret objects. Every time a person fishes into a pocket to take out the keys the [xx secret xx] object carried in the same pocket risks falling to the floor. Some of these issues map to the digital user interface realm: a device may contain personal information but supports tasks that involve shared use outside the immediate peer group. Watching a sports event on a Mobile Phone TV for example.

There are other ways to scope secret things that people carry. Our summer intern from last year carried out a series of interviews with organisations such as hotels, department stores and the police asking about: what people lose; with what frequency; how long it takes to discover they are lost; the triggers for losing; and the steps and barriers to recover the objects. Items turning up in lost and found included balistic weapons and large sums of money all of which require different levels of privacy and secrecy depending on the context in which they are carried. Mobile phones are relatively easy to recover because people tend to notice they are missing quite quickly, they can be called by the owner, and even if switched off they include a call log. However even if the ability to track down the owner is easy, recovery is not necessarily straight forward if people don't want to be identified with having been in a particular place and/or location at a particular time.

You look at a group of people and see a group of people. I look at the same thing and wonder what their secrets are and what I can do to keep their secrets well, secret.

And the photo above? Nothing to do with secrecy research - just a random shot taken in an elevator.

Posted by Jan at 11:47 PM | Comments (2)

Turns Towards

About 7 minutes spent watching the body language of a telephone conversation on a Tokyo side-street. The conversationalist spent most of his time turned to the wall, or more accurately turned to the 'corner' afforded by the pipe and the wall (the lady looking up the street was not with him and quicky moved on). But why?

It's an extreme example of not wanting to disturb other people with details of the call. It is more usual to see Japanese people to move to take a call out of earshot and/or to cup the hand around the mouthpiece and speak quietly.

What devices are associated with carrying out what anti-social activities? Anti-social to whom and in what contexts? Mobile phone's and talking loudly, electric batons and torture. Does taking out an object imply intent to carry out a particular task? And how does the perception of devices/services and their associated tasks evolve as the majority of users switch from early adopters (with their inherent behaviours) to more mainstream users? How does this perception change as the range of features offered by that device changes? How would people react to a stun gun that is mostly used to kills bugs?

Can and should we create a feedback loop to help user's better understand the social reaction to utilizing technologies? Can we demystify technologies to lessen the social reaction in the first place?

Posted by Jan at 10:50 PM | Comments (1)

Well Hung

Properties of the lock condusive for carrying around neck. Too long and it increases the risk of getting snagged, too short and it just doesn't fit. This lock is notable for how flimsy it it compared to the value of the bike.

After a few consecutive days of good weather the bicycle messengers are coming out in force. Tokyo's got a relatively high percentage of tricked out rides. Just need a good excuse to study communication practices of bike couriers.

Posted by Jan at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2006

Wanting Some, Wanting To Avoid Some

Trend spotter out in Shibuya on a friday evening, above. Self caught in reflection of motorbike mirror documenting street life in Ho Chi Minh City, below. Tele Atlas van recording street data in Brighton, bottom photo. Satellite photography.

What right to record what data? The obviousness by which it is done? The practical ease at which people can opt out of data collection? Who has what right to view the data?

Posted by Jan at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

Notifications

Notification of bike parking violations. Tokyo above, Chengdu, below. Which is more practical? efficient? noticed by the violator? noticed by the other membes of society? noticed by the peson who enforces violations?

Posted by Jan at 10:06 PM | Comments (3)

Bling Customisation

Posted by Jan at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2006

What You Take, When You Go Where You Go

There is s a corner of the office that is forever collecting materials for the next field study. The process of piling things up starts anywhere from 3 weeks before departure and usually reaches its conclusion the eve before heading out. Making sure everyone brings the equipment they are supposed to is not especially difficult, but neither is it straight forward given that team members arrive from different home cities.

So what to bring and what to leave?

The minimal kit is a decent camera, three fully charged batteries (doing away with the need for a bulky charger), spare memory, a paper notebook and a wad of cash.

The maximal kit includes: printers + inks; diary kits (cameras, chargers, spare batteries); a wide variety of camera, video and audio bits and pieces; spare laptops for secure data entry (e.g. hiring students in China) or for running specialist software; print-outs of all forms needed for the first few days; and a med kit. Some things like white boards & bicycles are bought on arrival but when time is tight, and it often is, it is easier to bring most things oneself. (Yes the running of the whole study can and frequently is subcontracted, but the pros and cons of subcontracting are another issue).

Shipping everything in advance? It's sometimes feasible when there are no international customs for packages to get stopped at: too many times electronics-heavy research kit is held up in customs or heavily taxed or both. It's funny how importing 6 identical cameras (for user diaries) can be considered suspect. Even with customs out of the equation and regardless of what the courier companies want you to believe, if it absolutely, definitely has to get there on time you need to take it yourself.

Off on another study next week with a research team arriving from different corners of the globe. Will they bring everything? Let's see.

Posted by Jan at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2006

Street Fill

iMac dumped on Tokyo back street. Land-fill. Street-fill.

Posted by Jan at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

Mobile Essentials

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.

Posted by Jan at 01:31 PM | Comments (1)

March 19, 2006

Don't Do As I Do

2 sets of apartment blocks in Ho Chi Minh City. One literally overflowing, the other externally more ordered and possibly sterile.

Which would you prefer to look at?
And which would you prefer to live in?

Posted by Jan at 08:18 AM | Comments (0)

When Understanding Doesn't Matter

"Please refrain from the following acts in the store"

Many of the Japanese customers to this store will be unable to read with understanding this text, so what's its purpose?

Posted by Jan at 07:18 AM | Comments (5)

March 18, 2006

Unexpecting the Expected

Close to midnight, after giving up on me being a customer, 3 rick-shaw drivers are fine to just hang out around Barkhor Square, Lhasa, chat about the day's events and and smoke heavy chinese cigarettes. Somewhere a phone rings and one driver unexpectedly pulls a Razr phone out of his trouser pocket and takes a call from his wife.

It was the middle of winter and there were relatively few passengers. The cost of this device related to his income? My perceived cost vs. his actual cost. A practical design choice in his line of work? Does it matter?

Posted by Jan at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2006

Learning From Extreme Products

These photos, taken last year on a private trip to Chengdu, are from a shop selling equipment for the emergency services. As with the PLA store it was open to the public - so uniforms, accessories, ID badges and flashing lights to stick on the roof of your car were all for sale to whomever was able to stump up the cash.

Two police officers (or possibly private security guards, I'm not especially china-uniform-literate) were standing next to me checking out various electric shock devices and in the spirit of try-before-you-buy they decided to, well, try-before-they-bought. Since this was a small shop the electric current crackled a couple of feet from my face for each of the 3 models they tried. The guards appeared to be discussing the merits of each device before picking one out then moving on to negotiate the price with the owner.

The unique selling points appeared to be their size and whether the case was metal or plastic. The packaging advertised that they could shock to 35,000 Watts of power, a fact which I was not interested in validating. They had already succumbed to feature creep - the most feature rich included a torch, siren and electric shock button with the design making it possible to multi-task... see who you're electrocuting as they hold their hands up to cover their ears. I picked out a large plastic model which from the perspective of someone trying to subdue an assailant has the potential additional benefit of being usable as a cosh, it costs 100 RMB (8 Euro).

The three buttons on the device were identical so the only way to know which button belonged to which feature was trial and error. The design was not particularly smart given that people are prone to forget the details of infrequently carried out tasks. The electric shock feature did not work unless a plug, otherwise dangling from a short strap, was inserted in a socket on the base of the device. At least that's the theory - what is the quality assurance of a device that costs 100 RMB?

This shop happened to be in China, but I'm pretty sure I would have similar legal or grey-market consumer choices from Colombia to Canada, the UK to the US.

Designers often talk about learning from lead users or extreme users. What merits are there for looking at and learning from extreme products both in terms of their design, and in the moral/ethical/commercial/legal reaction of society to those products?

Posted by Jan at 10:44 PM | Comments (1)

Notice, Notification

Discouraging the anti-social behaviours of dog owners through actions that many other people would consider anti-social, even if it involves graffiting one's own wall. The close proximity of the words to where the dog-defecation takes place is a nice touch and shows the effort of the writer.

Signage typically includes information about the authority of the sign-poster e.g. 'the park is locked after 6pm' 'by order of the mayor of Brighton'. Who has what 'right' to post what infrormation where? By whose social/legal/moral authority? How is this information perceived by the signage readers? (How) are behaviours affected? And how can affects be multiplied through other factors - such as the presense of a remote control camera?

Posted by Jan at 08:30 PM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2006

Double Wrap

The smallest example range of distribution of objects that I've come across during behavioural research was interviewing a vice-squad policeman in Berlin. He discussed drug dealers double-wrapping their product in clingfilm which was then carried in the mouth. At the point of sale one item is taken from the mouth and handed over. If the police tried to bust them they swallow the produce and since the drugs take time to clear the digestive tract it meant putting dealers behind bars at least overnight for what often amounted to a small bust.

The range of distribution more affected the consequence of discover by the wrong person (in this instance the police), rather than risk of theft per se.

Do I know the origin of the Double Wrap shop name (half way between Harajuku and Shibuya photo above)? I do not.

Posted by Jan at 08:20 PM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2006

Slip, Grip

Deck mats as stair grips - leading up to skate shop.

Posted by Jan at 08:17 PM | Comments (0)

Knowing When Something is Worn

What are the circumstances that trigger knowing when something is overly worn and no longer useful for its intended purpose? Things wear unevenly. And since the context of use varies so do definitions of 'overly worn'.

Posted by Jan at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

Pointer, Sent

Following a request for pointers to papers and articles, I particularly enjoyed Paul Dourish writing about the evaluation of ethnographic research papers in HCI - paper online here and his related research here. He ends with:

"Frankly, I doubt that this is the last CHI paper on ethnographic work that will find itself forced to end with "implications for design" ... but it is certainly nice to think that this is a possibility"

Which in a round-about way leads me to the question - what motivates you to do what you do? And how far are you willing to go to communicate this to others? Coming from a corporate research lab - my starting assumption is that none of the research or design we do is by default relevant for anything or anyone. The relevance comes from all the communication that occurs around the edges of the actual research from observing, listening and debating, anticipating other people's next steps whether it is 15 months or 15 years from now, and trying to figure out the smart questions in that space before they get there (whether we are successful at doing this is another matter entirely).

And, bringing it back to the closing statement of Paul's paper - where do conferences fit in with all of this? Like researchers, conferences need to fight to first gain relevance, and then continue to fight to maintain relevance.

Thanks VT for the link - the book is on its way.

Posted by Jan at 08:12 AM | Comments (4)

March 12, 2006

Localised Design

An example of a localised seat design for an airline in China (Sichuan Air or Air China if I recall correctly). The cup holder can support the almost ubitquitously carried green tea/hot water containers (above) without having to lower the main tray (below).

Posted by Jan at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2006

A Slightly More Universal Remote?

Photo of a remote controller taken in a room of a short-stay hotel in Seoul. It controls the TV, DVD, air conditioner and lights. Whilst people are prone to complain about having too many remote controls cluttering up the living room cramming everything on one remote controller is a far from optimal solution (though perhaps better in a hotel context).

Every so often someone pushes the mobile phone as a remote controller for anything from slide show presentations to toy cars and robots (via Bluetooth) to TV (via IR) to topping up parking meters (via SMS) to setting PVRs (via the net). By and large the mobile phone user interface offers a very poor and limited remote control experience - just about OK as an emergency backup but not something you want to use every day.

Which is why the Nintendo Revolution controller could be interesting. Take a generation of people who are adept at navigating and moving and thinking in 3D (though they most likely wouldn't describe it those terms), add the convenience of having a controller lying around and what do you have?

The real revolution may come from what happens away from the Revolution.

Thanks Younghee for the sunday Korean to English UI translation services.

Posted by Jan at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

Anti-Social Sensors

Sensor and display showing noise levels on building site (shown in center-right of photo).

How do the behaviour and activities of the builders change according to the feedback displayed on the noise meter? At what point, and to whom is the information on the noise meter no longer relevant - because stakeholders are adept at judging noise levels? What exceptions are there to this? What are the consequences of going over limits? Does a greater degree of accuracy encourage behaviours that push things to the the social, anti-social and/or legal limits?

Same questions, but this time for a speedometer in a car...

Posted by Jan at 06:47 AM | Comments (5)

March 10, 2006

Monitored , Monitoring

This afternoon's office of sorts is a waiting room in a health clinic. I've just spent half an hour lying on my side whilst getting an ultrasound scan of my heart. I was in here yesterday too and in the intervening 24 hours had the pleasure of walking around with a number of heart monitors strapped to my chest and an event monitor designed to log heart-related activities. So now the monitors are removed, the scans are done and I've got 45 minutes to kill before the doctor can talk me through the results.

The waiting room is empty other than a lady who has just arrived and is seated to my right. She keeps looking just above my head, but never making eye contact suggesting that either she is in here for a condition akin to having (vertically) lazy eyes, or more likely, something is occurring just above my head. She gets called by a consultant and leaves. Somewhere to my left, behind a frosted glass screen I can hear a receptionist ever-so ever-so-politely field calls and direct the odd incoming patient to the appropriate room in the clinic. Mus(ic/ak), is being piped through speakers in the ceiling - a mixture of piano sprinkled with acoustic guitar. The blandest of bland magazines sit in rack at my feet and tone of room is comfortable and muted. I suspect these are all deliberate design choices - little things that keep patients calm and collected as they wait to be tested or wait for test results. It's a comfortable environment and now is as good an opportunity as any to catch up on emails and write.

I'm usually in the position of collecting data and asking questions of study participants, but today the view is from the other side of the fence. The doctor is young but appears to have a bedside manner and level of experience that somehow belies his age. New experiences are fun and this is no exception: warmed gel on the tip of the ultrasound; a lying posture which i guess is optimised for reading the patients heart and minimising spoken interaction; listening to the sound of blood being pushed around the body; and, over my shoulder watching as the doctor makes constant one-handed re-adjustments on an intricate control panel to bring up different views of the same data. To the untrained eye it all looks pretty complex. What exactly is he looking for, and once he's found it how will he communicate it?

During the recent presentation in Seattle Ian Smith raised the issue of biases in self documentation techniques such as photo-diaries or everything-I-touch-diaries - for example choosing what to frame or not frame in a photo. A related issue is how monitoring changes behaviours.

If say, we could monitor everything you do for 24 hours - from what you consume to what you say what would you do differently? And perhaps more interestingly what are you motivations for doing things differently?

Posted by Jan at 09:02 AM | Comments (4)

March 09, 2006

Consumer Options

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?

Posted by Jan at 09:38 AM | Comments (3)

Research Presentation, Seattle

Presentation on Exploratory User Field Research at Nokia's Mobile HCI Group which I gave in Seattle last week at an event hosted by Wendy March. The PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded from here [3MB].

Executive summary? Keep re-assessing the value long after the project is finished.

That, plus - conducting research outside the lab means dealing with everything that life can throw at you. Photo below? Part of street research in Berlin into what people carry and why - during an interview in a park with his alcoholic owner, trying to avoid being bitten and, naturally getting the data we were after. Bless.

Posted by Jan at 05:14 AM | Comments (4)

March 08, 2006

Identity, Memory

A simple and expressive example of how a restaurant overcomes the problem of guests forgetting their coats - an issue probably caused by the coats being located out of the line of sight when people leave. This restaurant is well warmed by the sun, and a number of guests arrive by car (relatively unusual for Tokyo) so remembering a coat may not be a high priority.

Our paper submitted to DUX last year proposed the concept of the range of distribution to describe how far people allows allow objects to stray from their person. Range of distribution is not just about distance, but also location in relation the body such as out of the line of sight and/or out of the range of reach.

Understanding the range of distribution for objects is interesting primarily because objects that are placed out of sight are more likely to be forgotten - and objects that are forgotten are less likely to be used, and people tend to value and eventually pay for things that they use. Another non-trivial issue is that the performance of wireless devices may be affected by how far objects stray from one another - some RFID readers have a range of millimeter's, Bluetooth has a range of meters. Its not just about data transmission but can also affect battery life as devices scan to relocate one another.

Back to the restaurant cloakroom... guests are given a toy (shown in the box below) that matches the one on the hanger (photo above). When leaving the restaurant the toy acts as a reminder that the coat needs to be taken, and perhaps more obviously acts as a ticket to identify the right coat. Simple, fun and elegant very much keeping with style the restaurant itself.

Posted by Jan at 06:22 AM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2006

Things That Are Spoken

In China a number of VOIP phone, such as a phone in Beijing above, speak the cost of the call once the call is completed. Audio feedback in the context of the shop is a potentially useful feature in a number of ways: it projects to others the services that are available in store - enabling sales; the audio feedback provides an additional layer of transparency (yes - an oxymoron, indeed) since it is more difficult to inflate the cost of a call to a customer or between customers if the price is announced; the shop owner can attend to other things without having to keep an eye on the customer - the end of the call signals the need to collect payment (assuming the call is completed); and in places where illiteracy is an issue it supports users who are less equipped to comprehend the alternative visual feedback.

Examples of spoken features on mobile phones? The Nokia 1110 and 1600 targetted at emerging economies provide speaking alarm and clock functionality - the latter provided through a long key press on a dedicated button. Related research here and here.

There are of course potential drawbacks to providing audio feedback not least annoyance. But being the cultural tourist that I am, the sounds are part and parcel of being in China.

Posted by Jan at 06:05 AM | Comments (2)

March 04, 2006

Mobile Phone Kiosks

This is technically a mobile phone. But if I'm completely accurately its actually a mobile phone kiosk - part of a service offered by local entrepreneurs in Ulan Bataar.

The first time I ventured onto the street of UB I encountered an individual on the street holding what appeared to be a white landline, shifting from foot to foot in the intense cold (similar to the three ladies in the photo below). My first hunch was that they were selling used phones. As the day wore on, and more sellers were encountered it became apparent that they weren't selling phones, but rather telephony.

A number of the so-called white phone sellers offer infrastructure akin to a traditional phone kiosk to support making a call - and this ranged from a wooden stand to hold the phone to a cushioned seat. Cigarettes and chewing tobacco were also for sale. To be frank it was a little unnerving, to see a white phone customer walking along the street with the white phone seller walking along side them holding the body of the phone, the cable dangling between them. Mobile, yet tethered to one another.

MobiTel, the primary mobile carrier in Mongolia rents wireless battery powered white phones for around 100,000 Tughriks (70 Euro) for 3 years. The seller of the service must make a 10,000 Tughrik deposit to be able to make and take domestic calls from the phone, and a 100,000 Tughrik deposit is required for international calls. The price of the service for consumers fluctuates according to where the phone is located - generally the more competition the cheaper the cost.

For me this is an interesting example of a largely public service (telephony) offered by private individuals. Unlike fixed line phones, of which there appeared to be few in UB, the seller of the service is able to relocate to where there is most demand for the service. As with many street vendors - the location of a pitch once obtained is closely guarded - so there is not true mobility in the sense that anyone can conduct business anywhere without concequences, but when there is an event for example a bout at the Wrestling Palace, then the more white phone sellers can gather to offer sufficient service to an increased number of punters. Just like any other vendor be it a hot-dog stand or to stay within the Mongolian context a Mongolia Booz seller.

The major benefits of mobile phones come from being tools that offer personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication (possibly also the time and location shifting of experiences but lets save that for another day). Fixed line phone kiosks offer a degree of privacy and typically more shelter and the white phone kiosk users forsake privacy for convenience.

As more services go mobile a new challenge arises - how to notify customers that a service is offered in a particular location?

Posted by Jan at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2006

Public Charging Facilities

Electricity sockets in Vancouver Airport targeted at laptop users but also widely used to charge mobile phones. Infrastructure extending the feasibility of power hungry tasks such as watching video.

More adhoc charging at Narita Airport, below.

Posted by Jan at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)

Bottlenecks

The possibilities for social proximity applications perhaps enhanced from a human bottleneck (Vancouver immigration, above). How might bottlenecks, or other group dividing or clustering behaviours be manipulated to enable applications? Who gains and who loses in these situations?

Posted by Jan at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)

Activities That

Activities that are either illegal or considered by many to be anti-social. What are the risks and concequences of discovery? What happens to the physical (or digital) objects once the activity is complete? How are they disposed of?

The day after tomorrow you are able to carry everything you've ever watched in your pocket. Is the digital equivalent to this simply deleting anti-social or illegal content? Or is there something more?

Posted by Jan at 08:34 PM | Comments (1)

Checking Out, Checking You Out

In the departure lounge of Seattle Tacoma Airport, visitors flying out of the US are supposed to 'self check-out' using a US-VISIT homeland security machine (its appearance is not dissimilar to a US style free standing ATM). Whilst it did not yet appear to be obligatory a staffer informed me that not checking out would delay my next entry into the country by 'an hour or two'.

The process for checking out is: insert a machine readable passport into the slot of the security kiosk to be read; place the left index finger on the scanner; then the right finger; then have a photo recorded by a camera. If there are no problems a receipt is produced (shown above). I didn't observe anyone else using the machine and I'm not sure exactly what happens if there is a problem.

On the surface this is a good idea - speeding up the exit and subsequent re-entry of visitors by delegating some of the leaving-authentification-task to the user and technology. Sovereign countries have the right to have set the rules for people entering and leaving their country. However the self-checkout process left me feeling uneasy. Being finger printed is still strongly associated with being arrested, nor do I trust what happens with the data once it is collected. The system itself may have inherent demographic biases, though automating the process may reduce the risk of negative profiling. Ultimately the unease was a result of being an active participant in one's own verification, for a task that so often was handled by a human. I get to steady the gun to help someone else shoot me through the leg. Of course only the guilty have something to hide - as someone who is frequently pulled aside for additional checks I'm aware of the biases of data of meeting somebody's definition of some profile. Maybe it just tiredness or may be something more?

We have a choice about where to travel. This was a productive and enjoyable trip, but first and last impressions count.

Posted by Jan at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

(Lack of) Trust

Sticker on the cash register in a sandwich restaurant - 'If you don't get a receipt, your meal is free'.

It's likely that this restaurant chain has a problem with staff theft. A staff member sells items on the menu, the order is not run through the cash register, and the money is pocketed (stolen). Although the sign faces customers it actually meant for the staff - they know that customers might pick them up on having a receipt they are less likely to steal.

Seen another more obvious version of this at Singapore Airport - 'if you don't get a receipt please call this number...'

Update: chatted with one of the store workers - turns out that as this is a franchise the head office insists upon these stickers to avoid the manager of this store and his/her workers from not running purchases through the cash register. It's an issue of trust, but between whom?

Posted by Jan at 02:00 AM | Comments (3)

March 02, 2006

Crayola

Part of the task of ordering a sandwich delegated to the consumer.

A desire to speed up the ordering process and reduce errors? Supporting people speaking english as a second language? But is a concequence of too many choices?

Posted by Jan at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

Sterile Environments

Sterilisation pad for phone handset. Some what surprising to find in the USA but similar bacteria killing tools common in Korea and to a lesser extent, China.

How much does this meet a need? And with which users will this create a need?

Posted by Jan at 10:14 PM | Comments (4)

Please & Thank-you

A slightly unusual sentiment in this graffiti - someone has added 'please' and 'thank-you' to the sign above right to the ATM.

Please 'no loitering, customers only' thank-you

Posted by Jan at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)

Delivery Mechanism Trade-offs

Newspaper delivery mechanism = value of what is delivered vs risk of theft vs risk of damage vs effort taken to deliver. Digital equivilents?

Posted by Jan at 12:08 AM | Comments (6)

March 01, 2006

Update Cycles

Personalized parking lots, above and parking lot with corrected text, below.

Using names to personalise parking lots implies extra work to re/de-personalise them when that person leaves. But does it? Do Del and Sandy still work there? Does it matter?

Posted by Jan at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

Unlikely Solutions

Do the opposite of what I say, to correct what I say.

Posted by Jan at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

Grace Periods

Who enforces the rules? What are their motivations?

Posted by Jan at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

Urban Frames

From the backstreets of Seattle - grafitti painted over with a patchwork of colours. The destruction of graffiti becoming a street art-form in itself.

Posted by Jan at 10:26 PM | Comments (2)

Accidental & Deliberate Exposure

A large part of UI design is about finding the right balance of what to present to the user when. But what happens when elements of the underlying system are exposed? In what situations could exposing the underlying system benefit users?

In what situations does the perceived exposure of the underlying system encourage particular behaviours? A topical example might include 'leaks' of new products. The email that you are guaranteed to read is the one that the author is trying to recall.

Posted by Jan at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)

Physical Phone Books

Will physical phone books still be with us in 5 years time?

Posted by Jan at 10:11 PM | Comments (2)

February 28, 2006

Local Insights

One of my favoured activities during stop-overs is buying up local newspapers and spending the rest of the flight poring the contents to figure out local preferences. This flight was an exception - I was out like a light as soon as I sat down. How culturally appropriate is it to put your income in a classified advertisement? Hindustan Times readers think it is.

Posted by Jan at 08:02 PM | Comments (1)

February 27, 2006

Technologies Around Spaces

Advertisement for using Suica equipped mobile phone to pass through ticket barrier, above. Vending machine using the same technology to purchase drinks, below. Both photos taken in Shinagawa Station. Japan Rail (JR) has invested heavily in Suica so it makes sense to find use of this technology clustered in and around its properties. A relatively easy way to provide consumers with exposure to a new technology, but will its use spread?

On a side note - the C-Mode DoCoMo/Coca Cola vending machine in Shibuya that supported payments via mobile phone is gone. It had quite possibly the most confusing user interface for any vending machine.

Posted by Jan at 11:46 PM | Comments (1)

How Real-Time is Real-Time?

Bus stop in Brighton, showing the time it will take for the number 1 bus to Whitehawk - 45 minutes.

Knowing how long something will take can make the time passing shorter not least because it allows a person to focus attention on other activities - reading a magazine, watching Mobile TV or text messaging for example. But just how accurate is this information? Time estimates can vary considerably according to different traffic conditions so the amount of time a bus takes to arrive may rise as well as fall.

What granularity of information is sufficient to be useful? Just how real-time does real-time need to be?

Posted by Jan at 10:04 AM | Comments (5)

Resolution, Error Rates

Sewn 2D bar code into beanie. Sufficient resolution to be read, but what level of read-error rates?

Posted by Jan at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

Used > Mail Out > Re-Use

At home nursing a rather nasty head cold today but at least managed to catch up on some reading.

In the spirit of recycling and re-use I'll ship this copy of Banksy's Wall and Piece to the first person that can point me to an online research paper or web site that best inspires and informs Future Perfect.

Post your answers to the comments.
Yes its subjective.
Maximum of one submission per person.
Deadline: Monday 27th February.

UPDATE: travelling on from the 27th to the 3rd - will mail the book out on my return!

Posted by Jan at 10:19 PM | Comments (10)

The Traces of Traces

These guides to paint the road markings were first laid down in November 2005 and are still visible 3 months later. Understanding the process of how something is designed and built can raise or lower its perceived value in the minds-eye of its users.

In what contexts is it desireable to include traces of processes? Or fake traces? Is there a point at which traces should disappear?

Posted by Jan at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2006

Rights To Use Public Infrastructure

Parking spaces in the public domain but not to be used by everyone - doctor, ambulance, residents, VIPs only.

For designers of mobile devices, understanding how public infrastructure is used and abused is important not least because it affects what people decide to carry and the relative importance and positioning of what is carried.

For infrastructure in public spaces - who has what rights to use what resources? How do people understand what those rights are? Who will have have priority over whom? What happens if the rules are broken? And what is the likelyhood of infringements being noticed?

Posted by Jan at 08:06 PM | Comments (1)

February 20, 2006

Getting Here From There

Sometimes it's good to be home and live and breathe with a regular rhythm. My home city is many things - not least of which is looking out from tall buildings and wondering about the stories behind each of the lives that pass ant-like below (Shibuya, above).

When travelling, the first emotional jolt that I may be nearing home comes from boarding a plane and seeing row after row of heads with jet black hair in front of me. That and the gentle ebb and flow of Japanese conversations.

When you've been away, what are the things that make you feel like you are nearing home?

Posted by Jan at 08:31 PM | Comments (5)

February 19, 2006

Recycle, Resale

The resale of used magazines mined from the waste bins in and around Shibuya station. Mostly thick and cheap weekly manga plus the a small selection of pornographic magazines (near left, back of the table). Stalls similar to this can be found near all the main commuter stations so its somewhat surprising that the infrastructure to recycle is not more sophisticated.

Posted by Jan at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2006

What You Are Offered

Photos taken during an exploration of purchasing experiences in Beijing. This gentleman approaches people exiting a large electronics market offering cheap software. No stall, just a 'come to my office a few minutes away'. The office turned out to be a one room apartment shared with his mother and involved following him at a brisk pace down side-streets and alleys. The selection of software all poor quality pirated material in a suitcase. Presumably he didn't sell this outside the market because his stock would be too easily confiscated during one of the semi-regular crackdowns or possibly from rival sellers who consider that their pitch.

Posted by Jan at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

Study Prep

All day workshop to figure out what to focus on in an upcoming concept validation study. Someone was thoughtful enough to bring sweets from China and in the course of a few hours we work through the different flavours. Everyone has something to show and tell and share. Package turns up and are opened and artifacts from far away are passed around the room. (How) can such simple objects excite and inspire?

The project team is preparing for the study from home bases in Tokyo, Helsinki, Beijing, Hyderabad & Calabasas and if it all goes to plan, meeting in 6 weeks time at the research site. Mutual understanding and common goals should make working at a distance a minor inconvenience. The questions to ask is whether there is sufficient mutual understanding and common goals?

Posted by Jan at 05:49 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

Everything Not Quite There

Flight arrives in Oulu 1:15am Monday.
Luggage is in Helsinki (probably).
Long queue for transport to get somewhere warm.
Sub-zero conditions.
No taxis to be seen.
Welcome to Oulu.

Posted by Jan at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)

Security Cat And Mouse (and Dog)

The degree to which perceived and real levels of security and risk of theft affect behaviours.

Heavy duty bicycle and motorbike locks are frequently sighted left chained to railings in London - in places that are oft visited such as outside a gym (photo above) or close to work. When I lived in London I had one heavy duty lock chained to the railings near work, one in the center of town and one that was carried - locking a bike up for more than a few minutes and out of sight means removing or securing everything that can be - each wheel, saddle, lights and sometimes also pedals, headsets (late at night with a bit of time), or deal with a high risk of theft.

The street signage is a reflection of the need for cyclists to find security and the people and organisations that maintain infrastructure in those locals to support (subsidise?) that security. I wonder how this maps the the digital realm?

And in Tokyo? In 5 years nothing yet stolen.

Posted by Jan at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

Public Convenience

Open urinal (to the right of the lamp post) situated on a Soho alleyway within close proximity to a main street and the (frequently long) queues of two night clubs. Ideal for males willing to trade a degree of privacy for a quicker relief. It legitimises passing pedestrians relieving themselves in a public space. Legitimately pissing in public is relatively novel in the UK though much less so in other societies where privacy is less of an issue or less of an option.

Are public conveniences 'convenient' for the user, or for other members of the public not wishing to observe the process?

Posted by Jan at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2006

Removing, Supplementing Core Features

Raku Raku 3G phone for sale in Japan - targeted at elderly users. Includes a slider where the owner can write phone book entries instead of using the elecronic address book. Taking core features such as the address book outside the phone can benefit non-literate and elderly users.

The fetching model holding the phone in the top photo? Here.

Posted by Jan at 08:28 AM | Comments (2)

Extreme Customisation II

Posted by Jan at 08:08 AM | Comments (1)

Phone Recharging

Public phone recharging in London - with an emphasis on security.

Posted by Jan at 07:40 AM | Comments (2)

February 11, 2006

Status Indicators

Posted by Jan at 07:33 AM | Comments (0)

Consistency Affecting Experiences

W-LAN offering on the first four carriages of the Brighton to London train. To what extent does a consistent experience affect service adoption? Usage?

Posted by Jan at 07:26 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

Hotel Experiences

Occasionally research study hotels are a little different. A variety of experiences available in the Hotel Pelirocco - each room having a different theme.

Posted by Jan at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)

Speed Camera Avoidance

Advertising targetted at taxi drivers. "Tom Tom One with Free Speed Camera Locator Loaded"

Posted by Jan at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)

Observation(s)

Somewhat unnerving to have local council security cameras rotating and appearing to obseve the research observations.

Who watches the watchmen? Indeed.
What level of transparency in what we do? In what they do?

Posted by Jan at 07:10 AM | Comments (1)

February 09, 2006

Tea and Buttered Crumpets, To Take Away

This morning's office is a cafe overlooking a fairly ordinary street in Brighton, a small city on the South coast of England. I've been sitting here, perched on a raised stool at the window since it opened at 7:30 am, in an effort to warm up - having been pacing the streets for a couple of hours already. To view the street I'm required to wipe condensation away the window every 5 minutes or so. There is a constant stream of teas, coffees, buttered toast and crumpets* being served to the morning rush-hour commuters.

I'm here to research something out there, but it's cold and the draw of toast and crumpets is enough to bring me in here. And anyway there things that can be learnt from being on either side of the glass. The time between ordering and the arrival of food and drink is long enough to be considered a micro break - enough time to take out a mobile phone check messages, perhaps send one or two. But no-one does. Why should they?

A 3 minute walk uphill from here is Brighton station. A 60 minute or so train ride and the passengers will dis-gorging from London Victoria and London Thameslink stations to join the fun that is London's rush-hour. I can't imagine anyone going from home to office in less than 90 minutes which means 15 hours a week spent on the activity known as commuting. Commuting to work in central London from London's suburbs can easily take an hour so for many of these people Brighton is a practical alternative.

Commuting habits are of interest to anyone who provides content or builds devices that are used to access content - whether it's web based, radio or mobile TV. These commuters have 90 minutes or commuting boredom to kill, enough time to listen to a lot of music, watch a feature length movie, read a newspaper from cover to cover, read a novelette. It's probably enough to write the first draft of novel. But how much of those 90 minutes do they really have? What does it mean to commute? How does commuting differ between cultures? And how will the commuting experience evolve with the availability of a wider variety of devices and content formats?

When the 90 minute journey is broken down to sub-tasks - leaving the home space, walking to the station, finding a seat on the train, the train journey itself, negotiating the station at the other end, using pubic transport at the destination and the eventual walk to the building. The longest uninterrupted part of the journey is likely to be the long distance train journey, and actually that's far from uninterrupted. Announcements occur every time the train pulls into a station, pulls out of the station, and when one is available - to notify passengers of the buffet car. We can't assume the commuter automatically finds a seat - many people spend part of their journey keeping an eye out for seating and in some contexts to relocate to better seating. Every time people get on and off lighting conditions, ambient temperatures and noise levels will vary - not optimal conditions for watching a movie if one is available.

How does a commuter differ from one-off travelers? They have in-depth understanding of the nuances of the journey they are taking - knowing which exit can shave a few steps off the journey time, where they are most likely to get a good seat, being able to prepare a ticket or card sufficiently prior to reach a ticket barrier.

The commuting experience varies significantly between cultures - whether its a single person driving a car in Las Vegas, a motorbike seating a family of four in Ho Chi Minh City or standing on the Yamanote subway Line in Tokyo. Is the culture one of early risers? Getting up early in Jakarta or Delhi provides an opportunity for avoiding the heat. Japan has more of a culture of (starting and then) working late.

[The cultural connoisseurs amongst you may enjoy the subtle but important difference between buttered crumpets and, well, buttered crumpet]

Posted by Jan at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2006

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?

Posted by Jan at 09:41 PM | Comments (6)

Out of the Box Experiences

The lady in the photo above on the subway in Seoul, South Korea. Her out of the box experience taking place standing in a moving carriage with harsh lighting and with limits on the amount of two-handed interaction (that this is her first experience is assumed - based on what she was carrying, her interaction with the packaging and the context - but I didn't actually speak with her).

Product designers and marketing departments often talk about the out of the box experience - that unique moment when the consumer first takes their product out of their packaging. The money has been paid and the benefits of owning the product have yet to be realised. The hopes "will I really be able to plug it into my TV?", fears "will it really do what I want it to do?", and aspirations "I'm gonna get fit and lead a healthy lifestyle now I have a Suunto heart monitor" going through the consumer's mind.

To what extent do out of the box experiences happen whilst out and about? On the bus, in the subway, sitting with mates in McDonalds? Is it possible to have multiple or layered out of the box experiences - one on the hoof and one later in the comfort of a home space? And how to design for this?

How will social trends and technologies change the dynamics of future the out of the box experiences? Enhancing the positives? Minimising the negatives?

Posted by Jan at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

Overt

Seating projecting what goods are available for sale in the shop. Can surrounding shops take advantage of this advertising space in some way?

Posted by Jan at 10:10 AM | Comments (2)

Mobile Infrastructure

Van for monitoring and catching congestion charging offenders. Mobile infrastructure introduces a random element (location) into the monitoring process.

Do congestion charging vehicles pay congestion charges?

Posted by Jan at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2006

Traces Of Events

Ambient traces of travel from someone who travels a lot, or at least travels on airlines and to destinations where security stickers are commonly used.

In our perfect future we can accurately track everything - the exact location, temperature, who and what is in proximity for how long, the information that was exchanged - every last minute detail. Some of this data could help ensure that your luggage arrives in tip-top condition, in the right place and on time. Or not. You land in a new country and immigration doesn't only check your luggage, it checks the history of your luggage.

It's 2012- your luggage in the hold of the plane and can communicate with the other luggage. What would they say to one another? Would they even speak the same language?

Posted by Jan at 04:10 PM | Comments (4)

Status Indicators

Posted by Jan at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2006

Coping with Sizes in Death

Infrastructure inside a hearse - the position of the rollers are adjustable to cope with different coffin sizes.

Different ways humans are sized up: shoes, socks, waist, headband, sleave, check, bust, inside leg and so on. In life and in death. Whether the hearse default sizes from yester-year can cope with today's shifting body shapes and sizes?

Do we shrink after death?
If so, by how much, over what period of time?

Posted by Jan at 04:44 PM | Comments (2)

February 01, 2006

Affordances

Posted by Jan at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

To Miss You, Is To Love You

Aibo is gone, but not forgotten
But also not missed
What does that say?

Posted by Jan at 02:58 PM | Comments (7)

January 30, 2006

Device Customisation

Customised iPod Nano encrusted in rhinestones - photo taken during a night out with friends in Shibuya.

Extreme customisation of devices such as mobile phones, iPods and tamagotchi is taking off amongst women (and occassionally men) in their 20's and early 30's here in Tokyo. Mobile phone and nail shops are offering extreme customisation as an extension of their existing services, nail shops being a particularly good fit given the skill set required to carry out the procedure. 7,000 yen (56 Euro) will buy you a glittery off-the-shelf design, whilst 60,000 yen (430 Euro) will buy you front, back, top and bottom fully customised design of your choice. Downside of the process? Losing use of the device whilst it is being customised, and the customisation process can invalidate the warrantee.

For the customer: what drivers for customising?
For the service provider: is it possible to scale up, to offer mass-customisation?

One of my recent side-projects was to document the extreme mobile phone and nail customisation process for two Japanese teenagers, from preparing their phones - removing existing print club stickers and other adornments, sketching desired designs, interactions with the crafts-woman, and then following the customisation process in the shop up until delivery. The research material is not suitable for an academic paper but may put some material together here at a later date.

Working from the UK for the next couple of weeks. What new things to learn?

Posted by Jan at 09:38 PM | Comments (2)

January 29, 2006

The Value of You, Is That You Are Here

This photo was taken on the escalator transporting passengers from the Keio Line exit of Shibuya Station and disgorging them into Tokyo's busy Friday night streets. In close proximity to the foot of the escalator there are 11 people representing 5 organisations hawking free magazines. They are not there because they love to dress up in lime green and red uniforms they are there because someone pays them to be here, someone sees a business opportunity. You can see something similar in urban centers all over the world - but why? What are the properties that make these spaces so popular for targeting pedestrians?

Quantum physics aside, being physically located in one space implies that someone is not physically present somewhere else at the same time. The value to the hawkers is partly based on the rarity value of a physical presence being in that exact location at that time, and from the possibility that that persons consumption behaviour might be influenced by first taking a magazine, then browsing, sufficiently absorbing and using information within it. (I'll resist the urge to write about the level of sensory engagement though its probably relevant here).

At some point in the future automated or semi-automated devices will be moving around these urban environments carrying out everyday chores on our behalf. The first of these are likely to be extensions of today's personal vehicles - who needs valet parking when your car includes a self parking feature? But before long the range of tasks they can complete, and that we feel comfortable allowing them to carry out on our behalf will extend. The view from the escalator will include non-human hawkers and non-human ped-estrians.

If devices are moving around and negotiating spaces on our behalf, what is their value to the hawkers? What happens to a person's value when its based on rarity, when something is maintains a physical presence on their behalf?

And what will the future hawkers be hawking?

Posted by Jan at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2006

Steadying

The properties of the roll of gaffer tape (on the dashboard, click to enlarge photo) making it an ideal cup holder for this Tokyo delivery truck driver.

Posted by Jan at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2006

Exploratory User Research Presentation

Slides from last nights short Pecha Kucha presentation on Exploratory User Research at Super Deluxe can be downloaded from here [3MB].

Related research about what people carry where, why and how can be downloaded from here and here.

[Thanks BH for getting the material uploaded so swiftly]

Posted by Jan at 04:58 PM | Comments (5)

January 24, 2006

Postcards From The Future

Had the pleasure of cycling down to Shinagawa this morning and getting Japan entry-permits transferred to my new passport. The new permit design includes an unsettlingly unfriendly 2D-bar code a poor substitute to the rich and more human-readable tapestry that was previously used by the immigration services. Will this enable Japanese customs to process me more efficiently? Perhaps. But the travels of the last few months have made me appreciate the finer subtleties of the various visas. Mongolia is a personal favourite, partly because it has a hologram of what I think is a flying pegasus, but could equally be an emasculated yak, and partly because its, well, Mongolia. Applying for entry visas is a bit like sending one-line postcards to oneself.

Our team spends a lot of time working on concepts 3 to 5 years ahead of what appears on the market. I spent one year working on ideas up to 15 years ahead of where we are now - it's quite a tricky mental space to visit though fun when you get there. You know those wonderful visions of the future where everything is white an uncluttered? Trust me, the future will be messy, and wonderfully so. I'm reminded of these things because in everyday life it's rare to come across bridges between where we are now and 10 years in the future - and my new passport says it is valid until 2015 (I expect to fill it by 2009). But where will I be in 2015? Where will you be for that matter? What will the world be like? Will there be re-entry permits in 3D? 4D even? Maybe the whole idea of an entry permit will have changed, based on a lack of privacy (by today's standards) bought on by continuous and seemingly ambient data exchanges. It will be taken as a given that you know that you don't have the right to travel somewhere without having to apply because you have the information at your fingertips. And they know you're heading there before you arrive, before you even left home. In fact they calculated the probability of you traveling there soon after your friend bought you a travel guide for your birthday, cross referenced this data with your credit report (enough saved for a trip) the analysis of phone call logs (excited tone of voice when discussing destination keywords), and half a dozen related purchases (though the system missed an opportuntiy to remind you to take stronger sun block because its been a particularly hot summer). All these information exchanges and status updates happening in real time, naturally. Lets be thankful for those in-store loyalty cards shall we?

Tonight I'm finalising some thoughts for a short presentation on Exploratory User Research for a design orientated audience of Japanese and English speakers. The format is pretty simple - show 20 slides with 20 seconds for each slide, and up to 20 presenters in one night. No chance to waffle, or to hear other people waffle. I'll post a link to the slides when I'm done.

Outside the sun dips behind Mt Fuji. In 3 months or so it will be climbable again.

[And the sun is rising over Algiers - safe travels SC]

Posted by Jan at 05:44 PM | Comments (2)

January 22, 2006

Barriers to Market Entry

You buy and sell second hand phones. What steps do you need to take before deciding whether to purchase a second hand device? How easy is it to check that the device works? And given that, what is the minimum infrastructure you need be able to operate? What are the barriers to entering the market?

A sign, a display case, somewhere to sit and something to sell. Photo from the extensive mobile phone market around Chengdu's Tai Shen Lan Lu.

Posted by Jan at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

Checked, Validated

You want to get your mobile phone repaired via the grey market (photo Ulaan Bataar, above), rather than via more formal repair shops certified by manufacturers. How sure are you that the repair has been properly carried out? What recourse do you have based on formal or social agreements if it turns out not to have been repaired properly?

Posted by Jan at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

Touch & Go Reservation, Payment

Advertisement in Harajuku station showing passenger of a Japan Railways Green Car (first class carriage) using mobile phone touch and go interaction to pay for a seat. Passengers normally have to queue to get a seat so one of the perceived benefits is in by-passing queueing. Mobile phone is equipped with Mobile Suica.

Posted by Jan at 12:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

Appropriate Behaviours

A neon sign at the bottom of this stairwell commands people walking up to only use the far left lane. The recent addition of bright red and green lines acknowledges that commuters ignored the sign and provides additional guidelines for what appropriate behaviour. A less formal version of traffic lights perhaps, but with a degree of authority never-the-less. Attitudes to authority changes according to contexts and cultures (cultural differences are well covered in this book).

Today street signs show up-to-date status information for many things including the number of empty parking bays in car parks (Brighton+), the length of time left before the traffic lights change (Bangalore+), to which is the least congested route into the city (Tokyo+). How will the way we navigate spaces change as manufacturers find cost effective ways to embed status indicators into everything from fabrics to wall papers, hand-rails to stairwells, pavements and roads?

Posted by Jan at 11:51 PM | Comments (1)

Considered Consumption

Recycled ash tray + plant = plant pot.

Components from D & Department Tokyo Project's warehouse store, a purveyor of everyday household, surgical objects and contemporary Japanese furniture (though used furniture doesn't appear on their web site). They specialise in re-cycling, re-furbishment and re-use. They also make a rather fine English/Japanese bi-lingual hotel-lounge 'please turn off your cellphone' sign.

Posted by Jan at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

Homes & Offices

Today's office is an office.

Situated on the 17th floor of a modern building located in a fairly non-descript part of the city. The view of Mt Fuji lies straight ahead but is usually shrouded in clouds even if you can see it through the smog, to the left in the far distance Yokohama, far left the Rainbow Bridge and Tokyo bay, and on the other side of the building a view towards the shopping meccas of Roppongi Hills, Shibuya and, in the near distance Shinjuku.

When I'm in town the places and spaces with emotional meaning start about 10 minutes bike ride from the research lab. So many strangers that are sufficiently familiar to not be strangers, but sufficiently unfamilar to be not friends or aquaintances. The anonymity of large cities.

Our research lab used to be located in Akasaka, an area known for its office complexes, being close to the Japanese parliament and packing a staggering amount of small bar and restaurants into an area about 500 m square and 6 stories high. If you happened to roll into work around 6 or 7am you would see very drunk salary men staggering out of the many drinking, singing and schmoozing bars looking for somewhere to freshen up, grab a bowl of stand-up ramen before heading to another day at the office. On a few occasions at that time of the day yakusa, or at least wanna-be-yakusa trying to walk four abreast on a narrow street, tattoos showing through open shirts under white vests, dodgy suit jackets slung over shoulders and on the arm of the wanna-be-boss, what most of you would probably describe as a moll. Yes I know - stereotypes, stereotypes based on experiences. Its hard to have serious attitude when you're very seriously wasted. I recall once being warned off trying to interview a yakusa gentleman for one of our user studies. (Sometimes during ad-hoc research studies team members like to interview the hardest looking person we can find - thus far its works out fine - you just need to pick the right starting conversation topic).

One early summer's morning a salary man in a suit was lying fast asleep in a semi-fetal position on the pavement, his head snuggled up to his briefcase, shoes off his feet and placed perpendicular to the curb. I like living in a city where he perceives that sleeping on a curb is a safe enough thing to do. I like that the reality is close to the perception.

One more week at home before the next study begins.

Posted by Jan at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

Topping Up

How you top up credit for an online game if you have no credit card? Scratch cards available from internet cafe about 60 km from Beijing (above) and a wider selection from an electronics market in Beijing, below.

Whilst topping up game credits by mobile phone is possible (it may even already be offered by the game companies - I've not researched the topic), it is a less compelling proposition where most people in the market are using pre-pay.

Posted by Jan at 02:43 AM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2006

Drawing on User's Prior Experience?

Above, wireless ordering device from a restaurant in Beijing loosely based on mobile phone user interface. Below, push button fixed line phone spotted in Seoul adopts rotary dialler for key pad layout.

Lazy design or smart design?

Update: Reader Jeff Howards points to an article on the original AT&T TouchTone Keypad Layouts [PDF 632k]

Posted by Jan at 08:01 AM | Comments (3)

January 16, 2006

Perception of Weight

This Skype phone is on sale in Japan. The space which in a wireless phone would house a battery is filled by a removable metal weight - seen standing upright on the desk. In our smaller/faster/cheaper future we have the option of making today's objects lighter.

What is the ideal weight of a mobile phone? How will the perception of the ideal weight change over time? And what factors will affect that change? Should a gold coloured phone weigh more than silver coloured phone?

(And which will fall faster in a vacuum?)

Posted by Jan at 08:20 PM | Comments (2)

January 15, 2006

Alternatives

Posted by Jan at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)

Textures

Posted by Jan at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Smart People, Dumb People

This person is smart. She owns a mobile phone and she's using public infrastructure to make a phone call. But why? A mobile phone lets her communicate when she likes, with whom she likes, from where she likes, pretty much how she likes (ok, as long as its voice call or text message).

Whilst the mobile phone offers the key benefits of personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication people often opt to use and will go out of their way to use public infrastructure because its simply cheaper. Some of you are reading this and thinking 'so what?' But if you work in the telecoms industry (which a number readers of this site do) you are likely to be out of touch with most people's reality. When is the last time you looked at your phone bill? Most people consider the cost of a call, of sending a message weighing up the pros and cons of the available alternatives. Economists call this utility maximisation. Utility maximisation is most obvious in highly price sensitive markets such as India, China and Mongolia (photo below shows privately operated public phone kiosk in Ulaan Bataar) but in the study of communication habits, you can find it in any part of the globe.

We found a subtler form of this behaviour in a study of public call offices (PCOs) and STD booths in India. A STD shop (photo below) is often made up of a couple of phones on the counter, with additional phone booths somewhere inside the establishment. The phone booths offer a higher degree of privacy and some form of seating yet in many cases customers opt to use the phones on the counter. Why? They are opting for convenience over privacy. Their conversations can be overheard, the noise from the street will flow into the conversation but it simply doesn't matter compared to the money that can be saved.

Lessons? Owning a device is not the same as use; carrying a device is not the same as understanding what it does; carrying a device will not necessarily lead to use; and when use occurs it will not necessarily be what you expect it to be. When a mobile phone is primarily used as a phone book to facilitate kiosk phone calls, how does this change the way the product should be designed?

And who are the dumb people in this equation? We are if we assume that people will not try to make the most of what they've got.

Posted by Jan at 07:02 PM | Comments (4)

January 14, 2006

Tour Bus Ethnography

Looking at my travel schedule for the next few months I'm left wondering what can I expect to learn from the relatively short amounts of time spent the field in different countries? At what point does spending a few days in a culture become nothing more than tour bus ethnography? Hop off the bus, stick a microphone in someone's face, take a few photos and tell everyone back home what a wonderful time that had by all and boy didn't we learn a lot.

One conclusion from a 10 road trip user study in US last year was that almost everything we learned, or ended up using in a meaningful way was gathered in the first 4 or 5 days of the trip. Admittedly this study was a little unusual - 100+ interviews, driving Cleveland to New Orleans, flying to Salt Lake City then continuing the drive down to Los Angeles. Without sufficient time for reflection what could be meaningful data is just noise. So what are the techniques to support documentation and reflection? A proper answer to this question will eventually appear in a research paper. One minor technique is to take photos of local newspapers. These can become a mental time and location stamp and can later be used to communicate a local flavour and issues. As you might imagine the Sunday breakfast chatter in and around Cleveland was no doubt grappling wth the weighty issue of how casual is too casual (photo above).

Given the constraints - what is an optimal and what is a sufficient amount of time to spend in the field? And if your project involves cultural comparisons - how much time is enough to rest, reflect and analyse between field trips?

There are two techniques that enable me to stay on top of things. The first is to consistently process data as it comes in - not always an easy task given the large volumes that are collected from different sources in such a short space of time. In practical terms this means assigning a field data manager to be responsible for all incoming data, scrubbing data to remove overtly private information such as birth dates or phone numbers before the files are circulated within the team and before they start to appear in internal reports. (Field data processing would make a good short paper or workshop if anyone wants to recommend a suitable conference). Another technique is simply to have a naming strategy for all files to that documents, images videos can be identified without having to open an application. Well catalogued data will be usable and can maintain its relevance weeks, months or years after its collection.

My second technique? Don't worry about the social niceties of staying awake and make sure I get sufficient rest when the body dictates I need it. The alternative is living in a permanent state of jetlag - otherwise known as permalag, or if particularly nasty permaphuck. And that just leads to burn out.

Thanks Ken for reminding me of the names we give to what we do, and to Raphael for reminding me how anti-social I am when sleep depri/aved.

Posted by Jan at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)

Seasonal Activities as Cultural Time Capsules

Seasonal activities such as skiing and snowboarding often lead to a non-trivial investment in equipment - a new deck, gloves, goggles, jackets, boots, trousers, hats, bags and so on. Most people don't (perceive the) need to, don't want to, or can't afford to buy new equipment every year so as a result the places where people gather to carry out these activities are in effect cultural time capsules. Whilst having lunch in a mountain restaurant we sometimes watched in quiet appreciation/awe trying to guess the year when particular colours or styles were in fashion on the slopes.

The snowboard scene in Japan is now being pitched as 95% fashion 5% sport. From a sales point of view it makes sense - the criteria for owning and being satisfied with a sports object changes more slowly compared to fashions which, without fail will change once a year. The North Face shop in Harajuku is a good bell weather of sports-fashion-brand's shift to fashion-sports. An evening shopper is more likely to stumble into a hip-hop DJed spray painting competition than a seminar on the hazards of climbing at altitude (camouflage North Face puffer jackets had some cred amongst the Tokyo hip hop crowd last year).

One regret from last week was not having the time to systematically document people, their equipment and in particular how they custonmised what they had. But it got me thinking about the logistics of setting up a photo studio on the mountain and being with people in one place long enough for them not to freeze. Perhaps this is an activity for the spring?

How long should/do product's last? What can be done to slow down or speed up the replacement cycle?

Posted by Jan at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

Links, Cost of Entry

Links provided on an event flyer from record store in Shibuya include: site, email, drillcast, podcast and phone number.

Price of entry? On door 1000 Yen (7 Euro), with flyer 800 yen, bloggers get in for free.

Posted by Jan at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

Notification

It turns out the markings left on a bike saddle by parking attendents in Chengdu are largely water resistant. And if you manage to leave your bike parked overnight for whatever reason, then the saddle will be marked with the fine needed to pay to get your bike back. Somewhat surprised to find it in one piece.

Posted by Jan at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

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?.

Posted by Jan at 10:05 PM | Comments (3)

The Power of Not Charging

Next to my desk at work I have a fine collection of photos of power sockets from homes and offices around the world - the result of rummaging around under desks, peering behind cabinets and following cables to their source. In user studies I'm always intrigued to see how people tackle the problem of keeping their mobile phone charged - after all a phone without power is largely useless as a tool for solving life's little emergencies, and above everything else this is the reason that people consider the phone a mobile essential.

It is possible that technologies such as bistable displays will means that devices will have functionality without power, but for now our daily/weekly rituals include remembering to charge, and once charged - remembering to take the object when next leaving home. But does it need to be this way?

In the near term usage patterns will change when the two or so hours it currently takes to charge your laptop/phone/iPod is shortened to 10 or 20 seconds. That's a sufficiently short time to be able to pause a conversation and top up power if it were applied to a communication device, for example using fuel cell or capacitive charging.

The challenge of keeping electrical devices powered up can be tackled from a number of different directions. It's possible to make a mobile phone which has sufficient power to last as long as the device itself. The obvious (but wrong) starting point is a massive battery/fuel cell pack - it would make the product impractical to carry and the consumer market impossibly small. The opposite approach has potential - shortening the lifetime of a mobile phone to last as long as today's battery life. This is not as far fetched as it may first seem considering use cases around mobile phones bought from vending machines, a method for storing personal data off the device, combined with a system for recycling and re-circulating 'used' products to new users. As with most tasks (except entertainment and bodily functions) delegation is another solution - simply delegate the act of remembering to charge a device to someone or something else. Asimo needs something to do whilst you're sleeping right?

Usage patterns are currently constrained (or in some ways anchored) by the need to leave a device in a fixed location for a length of time. As that length of time is drastically shortened, or indeed eliminated our current notions of how we charge objects will all seem rather quaint.

Posted by Jan at 02:50 AM | Comments (3)

January 11, 2006

Emotional Charging

When is the last time you smiled inserting a plug into a power socket? What would it take to make that happen?

Posted by Jan at 11:42 PM | Comments (5)

Elegant Thread

Posted by Jan at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2006

DRM In A Different Age

What are your mental triggers to remember where you've been? What you've done? With whom?

In Japan stamps are a common way of providing proof of having been somewhere. Train stations, mountain huts, sea ports, and airports often have a work bench where you can add an additional stamp. The designs are often simple and perhaps because of the format have an element of 'classic' about them - the stamp for Chitose Airport, Hokkaido shown below.

The tools to take photographs are widely accessible. But what are the properties that make physical and digital photographs so accessible to communicate experiences? As more and more about how the human brain works is understood what will be the next major content format shift? Can and will experiences be piped more directly into and out of the brain? Assuming people will want to carry tangible triggers for those memories, what form will they take? Why? What is the essense of an experience to be captured and communicated? How will the essense change as the tools to communciate the experiences change? And in a world where this is possible is the ultimate DRM the ability to totally remove or add memories of experiences to enable us to have that first/most recent experience again and again?

Giving away (implanting) content/experiences for free may not seem like a great way to enforce DRM, but if the value of an experience is in doing something for the first time for example a watching a cliff-hanger movie or perhaps falling in love, users may well be willing to pay to have those experiences removed.

Posted by Jan at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)

Visualisation

2D/3D visualisation aided by unique characteristics of what is communicated. Perspective in poster below.

Posted by Jan at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2006

Insights From Lack of Knowledge & Assumptions

In an exhibition in Chitose Airport highlighting road safety - mobile phone as trigger for accident. Whilst the artists were certainly given direction what can young children teach us about how the future turns out? What do we overlook because of our in-built assumptions, domain knowledge? What leads are missed for fear of asking 'dumb' questions in front of peers?

Chitose devotes a huge amount of space to retail activities - the entrance hall is more like a supermarket in Shinjuku than an airport. Kind of similar - cinemas that are in the fast-food business and the showing-film business, and McDonalds probably makes more money from financing franchisees or property rental than selling hamburgers.

Posted by Jan at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

Welcoming

Mechanism for welcoming guests to room - the name of the arriving party is clipped next to the door. Suitable for displaying other status or preference information?

Posted by Jan at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2006

Over Specification

Posted by Jan at 12:49 PM | Comments (2)

January 05, 2006

Acceptable Boundaries of Use

Today's office is a guest house half way up a mountain in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. I'm here with a research colleague to catch up on the last year, figure out where we want to go in 2006 and in between discussions make the most of what the mountain has to offer. In the village outside it's minus 10 and for the third night in a row it's dumping it down. The building we are staying in was initially a disappointment - semi-industrial in a run-down-damp sort of way, but after 3 days the room starting to look like home. It helps that that every evening the staff leave a thermos of hot water in the room (we happen to have some decent freshly ground coffee), that there is a spacious open air onsen 5 minutes away, and that someone nearby has left their Wi-Fi unsecured, bless them.

I'm tucked up in bed, and on the floor to my left a digital camera has been broken down into its composite parts and is (hopefully) drying out after being covered in snow. I'm familiar with the challenges of capturing data in difficult conditions - but tonight presented new hurdles. A combination of the cold - around minus 18 on the mountain, horizontal in-your-face winds, the need to remove outer glove-wear to be able to properly handle equipment, and the constant heavy snowfall meaning that after 20 seconds or so a new snow-drift has built up on the edges of the lens. Realistically the only way to clear the camera lens of snow flakes was to lick it whilst avoiding having my tongue stick to its metal frame (to the Finns reading this, yes, I know the solution to removing frozen body parts from metal I'm just not sufficiently physically agile, and am certainly not prepared for my colleague to do the deed). Earlier tonight I learnt that the frozen residue left by my tongue can serve as an OK if somewhat inaccurate soft focus lens filter (top photo). In all I'm satisfied that the camera continued to work and that photos and memory card survived the cold.

User experience practitioners often use personas and scenarios to understand and communicate how a product will be used. But what happens when use falls outside acceptable limits? What are acceptable limits? Is it reasonable to expect a camera to function in these conditions? Is it reasonable to expect your phone to work after being run over by a car? Is it reasonable to carry your iPod Nano in your pocket without it scratching?

It's telling that on my last visit to Yodobashi Camera (one of the largest general electronics stores in Japan), consumers buying iPod products were handed a crudely photocopied sheet explaining whom to call in the event of it breaking. This is hardly a show of faith in the products they are selling and I presume is a result of fielding so many consumer queries related to perceptually faulty iPods. (As a comparison I've bought dozens of other mainstream electronics from the same store none of which included similar information). The law-suits over scratched iPod Nanos shows there is an obvious mis-match for acceptable boundaries of use between (some) consumers and the manufacturer.

There are two trends that are likely to considerably shift consumer perception of what constitutes acceptable use: miniaturization; and the availability of flexible componentry. Once objects reach a certain size the range of places that they can be comfortably carried and stored increases - making it feasible for it to be carried without significant extra burden for the user, comfortably placed in a pocket or tucked in amongst other objects in a bag. Objects will be carried and stored in locations and used in contexts which did not previously need to be considered in use cases. It is more comfortable to carry a flexible object next your (soft, fleshy, human) body than a hard object. Smart use of flexible components will increase the range of objects can be comfortably carried in pockets or next to the skin - expanding the range of use case scenarios for many products and along with it, user expectations.

Posted by Jan at 10:07 PM | Comments (10)

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.

Posted by Jan at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2006

Icon, Frivolity

Sweet icon on tumble dryer, used by (multi-cultural) members of the public. Whilst its common to see badly designed and inappropriate icons, it's relatively rare to see cheeky icons make it into physical product design. (Yes, all three categories are not mutually exclusive)

Posted by Jan at 09:42 PM | Comments (1)

Ideal Height

Simple mechanical design to optimise the height of the top-most tray.

Posted by Jan at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

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?

Posted by Jan at 09:18 PM | Comments (1)

December 31, 2005

Signing Off

Sitting on the flight back home, the lights are off in the cabin and like most of the passengers K is dozing in the seat next to me somewhat exhausted. We will touch down in Narita about 9pm new year's eve - so perhaps the rest of the passengers are saving their energies for parties that happen later on?

The laptop still has a bit of juice left and I have the relative luxury of a couple of hours with nothing to do but look at pictures from the last year and think. Life is fast, so its moments like these that serve as quality time for reflection. The sheer volume of photos from this last year is somewhat overwhelming - somewhere in the region of 30,000+ of my own, plus thousands more from my research team colleagues, user study participants (when keeping diaries) and subcontractors and scouts from different parts of the world. All of the photos trigger memories, and associations and in the user studies I'm continually struck by the extent to which every-day people lead extra-ordinary lives and the priviledge that I have in being allowed to witness and document.

To the people who made this research possible, and kept life so interesting, warm and ultimately human, thank-you.

Posted by Jan at 11:59 AM | Comments (5)

December 30, 2005

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?

Posted by Jan at 06:14 PM | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Jan at 04:45 PM | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Jan at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

Versatile Properties

What percentage of the world's population wears some form of flip-flop?

Posted by Jan at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2005

Adoption. Adaption?

Traditional (often black and white) physical prints are scanned and adapted in PhotoShop before being re-printed.

Came across something similar during a user study of the communication habits of low income manual workers in China - the liviing room/bedroom/study had a Photoshopped photo of the wall showing the couple dressed as bride and groom. The photo and backdrop taken years after the event because they did not have formal photos of the event.

Mainstream availability of the tools to re-write history? Who will re-write what (personal) history? Why?

Posted by Jan at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

Snap Shot Photo Studios

One thing to spare a little time for during user studies is visiting the neighbourhood photo studio. I rarely go to have a photos taken but the space offers insights into local cultural norms and in some areas - adoption of technologies. Some studios, especially those which offer 'print club' photo stickers are adorned with photos of customers and give a pleasant sense of the volume of people, time passing and personal preferences. Most urban spaces have somewhere where locals, with the help of a studio assistant can create then pose for a scene which is then documented. But why pose in front of a painted canvas of the Potala Palace, when the original is just around the corner? Why pose in front of a beach scene?

With the tools to capture rich experiences be they photos, audio, video, location data, whaterver, in the hands of more and more individuals what value added do studios offer?

Star Shot photo studios in Seoul are a good example of value added services. Geared up to making the punter look very much the star - the results typically involve over-saturated colours, heavily patterns backdrops, the removal of any blemishes, and a fine haze of soft focus - in other words your typical magazine star treatment.

Photos above from Lhasa whilst photo below is from New Orleans, mostly gay and lesbian night club. For 8 US dollars (6+ Euro) or whatever the clubbers could negociate - and they did try to negociate. Photos printed on a mobile (HP) photo printer. The spray painted sheet includes a tombstone with the engraving 'Chronic - get high, take a ride, then die".

This temporary studio tucked inside the entrance of the club was moderately busy, and run by a real gent.

Photos taken from street and club research during 2005.

Update: You may also enjoy [correction] these photos from a studio in Tibet and others by the same gentleman.

Posted by Jan at 08:21 PM | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Jan at 07:36 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

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?

Posted by Jan at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

Dual Properties

Posted by Jan at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 01:15 PM | Comments (2)

December 25, 2005

Icon, Iconic

Posted by Jan at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Jan at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)

Suggested Parameters Of Use

Size very much based on local norms.

Ever wondered why business class seats are so wide?

Posted by Jan at 12:35 PM | Comments (4)

December 24, 2005

Identity

Public interface identifying apartment person and/or family. Hints of corrective design

Posted by Jan at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

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?

Posted by Jan at 12:23 PM | Comments (1)

December 23, 2005

Tickets, Stubs Of Tickets

In most cultures airlines take the body of the ticket and leave you to board with the ticket stub. I was trying to figure out why Sichuan Airlines does the opposite - keeping the stub and leaving the passenger with the body? Is it because as a newish airline they have more landing slots further away from the gates requiring bus transfer to the plane, (from experience) increasing the potential for passenger mix-ups and the larger ticket body is more suited as an additional check. It is possible to rip off part of the ticket body (the UI equivalent of a one way switch) and still retain the necessary information for boarding and seat allocation.

E-tickets particularly from low cost airlines such as Ryan Air have changed mainstream perception of what makes an (airline) ticket. What is essence of a ticket? How will this change as the tools to read and scan information digitally are in more and more hands?

Posted by Jan at 12:20 PM | Comments (1)

Negociations

First off, negociate the price of a translator.
Next the translator negociates the price of a repair.
Lastly, negociate your way out of a crowded market with a proven reputation for pick pockets.

Photos from some time this month, Ulan Bataar.

Posted by Jan at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

Used Sales

Traders haggle over the price of a barely used, boxed mobile phone. One trader's stall in the foreground - buying and selling used phones, and a list of phone numbers for sale.

Photo taken last week in Chengdu.

Posted by Jan at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)

Cleanliness (Not Godliness)

Not come across this kind of infrastructure outside Asia Pacific: public phone charging station in Chengdu airport includes a small sterilisation pad (just above the red cables, inside the machine). On my travels Seoul appears to be the world capital of cleanliness paranoia - mobile phones shops such as Phone & Fun and member's clubs such as TTL have cleaning stations where you can wipe down, air-blast and sterlise your mobile phone.

What cultural differences are there in attitudes to cleanliness? Practical differences like dealing with dirt, access to clean water, the affects of extreme humidity, dust, animals living on-site or diseases? How does the perception of cleanliness of an environment affect use of infrastructure or personal objects and devices?

And lastly, just because the infrastructure is there does not mean it is being used, is used effectively, is understood, or is on a practical level, necessary.

Posted by Jan at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Unexpected Behaviours

Cycling in Chinese cities I was frequently surprised by electric bicyles - the driver seated often with feet resting on pedals, but not pedalling, 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?

Posted by Jan at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

Scale of Repair Cultures

Formal and highly organised mobile phone repair culture in Chengdu, above and more disorganised and smaller scale TV and other electronics repair in Lhasa below. What are the pre-requisites for informal repair cultures? What are the repair volumes for TVs vs mobile phones? Diversity of stocks? Size of components?

Posted by Jan at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)

Premiums

Phone numbers for sale from one of the many street vendors in Chengdu. The plus numbers e.g. +10, +20 refer to the RMB premiums required to buy those numbers. The phone number 86823666 has a premium of +400 RMB (40 Euro). Prioritisation of user preferences can lead to charging premiums, or alternately giving discounts.

Posted by Jan at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2005

Perceived Threat, Perceived Security

Street market in Lhasa sells a wide range of underwear with security pocket for men (shown but not tested) and women. We've had blind user study participants in India who used scent amongst other criteria to know the denomination of bank-notes, and I wonder to what extent the inevitable smell of sweat/urine/blood would affect this understanding? In what other contexts will objects pick up a physical or digital scent?

It's easy to underestimate how the perceived risk of theft affects how objects are carried and then positioned when not in use, and how for people living in that environment it becomes second nature.

Spent a couple of hours in coffee shop in Chengdu - observed the same behaviour on two separate tables: person A sits down and (is later proved to be) waiting for person B. Person A takes off coat and hangs it on the inside of the back of the chair and waits 10+ minutes for person B to arrive. Person A has strong tactile feedback with the coat. Person B arrives and takes off coat and hangs it on the outside of the chair - minimal tactile feedback to the coat. Person B is able to rely on the eyes of Person A to notice a theft attempt of the the coat itself, whereas Person A needs to fend for herself for a while at least and hangs the coat in in a manner that makes its removal more noticeable.

Yes, should have taken a photos to explain this, but it simply wasn't the right thing to do in the context. And yes, 80 RMB (8 Euro) for a cafe presse with fresh ground coffee was a little steep.

Posted by Jan at 11:56 PM | Comments (5)

Natural Stack

Posted by Jan at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2005

Flexible Design

Posted by Jan at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2005

The Way It Is Balanced

Posted by Jan at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

Cultural Reference Points

Global cultural centers of gravity shift.
Today's Mouse will be tomorrow's mouse.

How much does your job rely on creativity?
How much of your creativity is based on your deep insights into local cultural norms?
How long will it take before the global cultural center of gravity shifts to marginalize your culture?
How long before the (global) relevance that you take for granted is gone?
How long before your job is no longer relevant?
What do you need to do to stay relevant?

Photo taken earlier this year wandering around Old Delhi.

Posted by Jan at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Odd Choices, Space For Media Consumption

Been trying to figure this out. Both toilet booths don't have their own toilet paper holder - the user needs to reach outside to grab some sheets. First time you need to go you end up with none and have to open the door, reach outside. Second time and you are more likely to over-estimate need and take too much paper.

Many Chinese public toilets don't have doors individual booths - is this an obscure attempt to increase the sociobility of the (mainly western) users of this toilet?

In many cultures the toilet is: a private space; where the user has one or two hands free some of the time; that is socially acceptable to enter a number of times during the day (though there can be a social stigma associated with staying too long if this is tracked) - making it perfect for short bursts of communication or media consumption. Women have the relative advantage in that sitting typically takes longer than standing and provides more opportunity for two handed device interaction.

Posted by Jan at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2005

Oversight

Posted by Jan at 11:25 PM

Worn Welcome (If You Are Chinese Speaking)

Posted by Jan at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Bedside UI

Posted by Jan at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

Wire Frame

Posted by Jan at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

Protector

Shoe polisher's customer's sock protected by card board.

Posted by Jan at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

Solar Heaters

First time I laid eyes on one of these from a passing vehicle thought it was some kind of satellite dish. Can be found dotted around Lhasa. Heats the water, but not hot enough to boil water. A small handle underneath the dish allows the user to adjust the angle of the dish.

Can the infrastructure be put to other uses?

Posted by Jan at 01:23 PM | Comments (1)

Communicating That Features Are Disabled

Security gate at entrance of gated community somewhere along Beijing Xin Lu. Calling out feature temporarily disabled through use of a metal box. Whilst it is possible to disable the calling out feature using software this solutions is easy to understand, can be adapted without referring to an authority, doesn't require literacy, and also sends a signal to people in proximity that a feature is not available.

Under what circumstances would a physical mobile phone lock/chastity belt be valid? Apart from disabling calling out, what other features would benefit from this kind of physical solution?

Posted by Jan at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

Net Presence

It's 10am and I'm today's first arrival in this internet cafe. It is however far from empty - half a dozen bodies are slumped dozing into red armchairs covered by blankets, and another half-dozen are still online half-heartedly playing a first person shooter - these are the remnants of last nights online gaming session. The place smells like an ashtray and somewhere a toilet has overflowed.

Posted by Jan at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Very Worn

Posted by Jan at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

Brand Ownership

Most common 'faked' branded jackets in Lhasa were: Ecko (by a wide margin), North Face and Mountain Hardware. Beanies with Nike logos were omnipresent and its costs the same or more to by one without any logo on. It would makes sense if the logo subsidised the cost of the garment.

Posted by Jan at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

What Is Communicated

A comment book in a cafe popular with back-packers.

Most of the entries are written in Japanese, with a smattering of English, Korean, Polish and French. Is it that Japanese are more inclined to write comments, or is it an accurate reflection of the cultural background of the visitors to this place? The entries detail places to visit, stay, travel tips 'the guides tend to under-estimate the travel times for fear of frightening you off', and occasionally longer posts about the how Tibetan culture is changing over time.

According to the cover this is their fourth book.

Posted by Jan at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)

Convergence

Radio, cassette, alarm clock and flashing light display. The most popular media formats here are tape cassette for audio and VCD for video.

Posted by Jan at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

Pool Table Lock

Locking private infrastructure in public space.

Posted by Jan at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2005

Outside, Inside

Outside the window mountain ranges and numerous glaciers drift by - it's all very tranquil.

Inside the cabin the in-flight entertainment has been hi-jacked by someone with a penchant for loud Chinese pop music. On the mini-video screens ladies with flowing robes and flimsy swords prance through fields and forests and the intercom is doing it best to cope with the soundtrack. The gentleman in the next seat is probably not a frequent flyer - whilst he's singing along and tapping his feet enthusiastically in the choruses he's bluffing the lyrics to most of the verses. His spirits have no-doubt been buoyed by an elaborate 3 minute dance display down the aisle from all three air hostesses to which he and many of the other passengers clapped along to. Somewhere along the line Sichuan Airlines worked out how to stand out from the crowd and they went for it.

Posted by Jan at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2005

Low Tech Solution

Pedestrians are stopped from crossing road by rope, which is dropped when its OK to cross. Lo-tech barrier.

Posted by Jan at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

Perpetual Lube

Is it possible for an extractor fan to self-lubricate?

Posted by Jan at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

Context, Trust

Spent the afternoon wandering around Chengdu with an inspiring traveler. We knew the direction of the center of town so we headed in roughly the opposite direction following our noses for the whole afternoon. In a small side alley off the main thoroughfare of a street market we chanced upon the local equivalent of a sex shop - a gentleman with a motorbike, the back of which is folded out to reveal a range of libido enhancers and condoms.

Buy a single Viagra which comes in an authentic looking Viagra container, the seal of which is already broken. Assume it is a fake - have no desire to validate.

Further along the alley there are two other ad-hoc sex shops. Why are they clustered in this alley?
To what degree does the environment convey trust in the product or service for sale?
In a market with a high degree of fakes, and with a product that is easy to fake, what extra steps does a consumer make during the purchasing process? How does it affect use?

Posted by Jan at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Sole

Street cleaners bicycle. Plus minus link.

Posted by Jan at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)

Recycling Buildings

Many parts of Chengdu are active building sites. One end of this apartment block is being torn down, whilst the other is still occupied as a temporary home by construction workers. On the top floor a work team is dismantleing the building brick by brick which are then stacked ready for re-use on another building. A fine layer of dust covers everything.

Posted by Jan at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Fused

Posted by Jan at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

Payment Status Indicator

If you want to park a bicycle in the center of a Chinese city chances are you need to use a bike-parking lot. Attendant marks the saddle to show that you have paid. Wonder how effective this is in the rain?

Posted by Jan at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2005

Protection

Unusual to find these arm protectors on white collar workers.

Posted by Jan at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

Worn, Trusted, Painful

The degree to which his instruments were worn implied trust that they could do their job. Just a little too blunt to be an enjoyable shave. Highly skilled, and gentle hands. His whole ensemble of tools packs away into a little suitcase hanging on the wall.

Posted by Jan at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Phone Number As Identity II

Mobicom [the primary Mongolian carrier] offers a student sign-up package. Part of the deal is a mobile phone number with the pre-fix 9961

"It's a good deal, but if I went for a job and gave a [student] phone number they would want to pay me less"

Posted by Jan at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

Steamed

It looks like frost escaping from a freezer when it is in fact the reverse.

Steam from basement workshop freezes on coming in contact with the cold (-20 to -30) air.

Posted by Jan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

Expectations Out of Sync

Wandering around UB and chance up disciples playing football in a temple complex. They invite me into the warmth for a reason - to mine the memory of my phone of all its value. Half a dozen files transferred from my device - particularly interested in obtaining photos of women from Japan.

Posted by Jan at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

Door User Interface

Door leading from a passenger cabin on a train. Journey times range from 30 to 90+ hours.

Where does the door lead?
What it is are the green and red buttons for?

Posted by Jan at 09:51 AM | Comments (2)

Phone Number As Identity I

What does your phone number say about you?

Numbers for sale in Ulan Bataar (photo above) and Beijing (below).

Mobicom - the primary Mongolian carrier has semi-automated the process (photo below) with in-store phone number selection. Baby steps on the way to something more sophisticated?

Totally redesign the way we make, keep and manage contacts. What could your phone number say about you?

Posted by Jan at 09:43 AM | Comments (1)

White Phone Kiosk

Posted by Jan at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

Motivations for...

Posted by Jan at 07:42 AM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2005

Comparison Shopping

A walk from the Container Market to Tomorchiin Gudamj takes you through an aisle of parked cars. In each one thick wads of different currencies - roubles, yen, dollars and renminbi folded and squeezed between the dashboard and the windshield. This market is very much for locals.

The car is converted into an effective money exchange - warm for the exhanger, sufficiently secure, and easily identifiable for repeat customers. One thing that is missing is notification of exchange rates - making it difficult as a consumer to know which seller to approach first. It's unlikely that they are simply not organised enough, or that the rates fluctuate too frequently. The act of exchanging money is legal but advertising it is not? A ploy to force customers to approach a car window and engage in negociation? Making comparison shopping harder?

Roll forward 5 years - everyone has mobile tools enabling easy, non-proprietary, sufficiently secure, proximate communication and increasingly the phone is used as a store of money and call credits. How will this scene be different?

Posted by Jan at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

Pirate TV (Sloppy Seconds)

Cable channels here are an interesting mix: the Simpsons dubbed into Mongolian, Korean & Indian dramas, Mongolian-rap videos, Chinese news, Russian cop shows and a Voice of Amerika. One channel is broadcasting back to back ripped DVDs. Really? Three subtle clues: the English movie is showing subtitles in English but to a different movie; one of the movies was a screener - just ok video quality but echoey audio; and the clincher - they also broadcast the DVD menu before the movie starts.

Posted by Jan at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Anticipating What Services Are Offered

Anticipating services from observing infrastructure.

Posted by Jan at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

Source of Power, Activities Related To

Charger as a suggestion of presence. What activities are implied by the kind of charger? Cable? It could be so much more.

Knowing that use is affected by whether or not something is plugged in - the plug works itself loose when someone tripped on it, the door opened and a quizzical/annoyed face looked out.

Posted by Jan at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)

Communicating Conditions

The carriage is warm, but the metal window lock is frosted - the cold conducted from outside.

A subtle staus indicator for external temperature conditions.

Posted by Jan at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

Proximity To Use

Each carriage comes with its own furnace, topped up regularly with coal by the guard. Gloves stored in anticipation of next use.

Posted by Jan at 04:01 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2005

Getting Through OK

This morning's office is an anonymous waiting room on the second floor of Beijing Main Station. A TV is on in the background watched by 3 waiting passengers and two bored, elderly waitresses. Two of the passengers are smoking oblivious to the authority of the no-smoking sign, whilst the other has just finished tucking into a large pot of instant noodles and now appears to be enjoying picking her teeth. I'm sure we can all appreciate the pleasure she gets from this, but up close it's a one-sided satisfaction. To sit down in here I need to order. The coffee comes in the form of a paper cup, a sachet instant coffee and a nod of the head to a thermos of hot water, the cork of which is wonderfully worn. The serving ladies are friendly - trying to persuade me that I missed a pouring in some grains of the instant caffeine/sugar/lactose mix otherwise known a Nescafe pre-mix. They sell me a second sachet for my journey, or are they recommending I use both in one cup?

Outside the station it was cold and a tad chaotic - my luggage serving as a convenient battering ram through the half a dozen people a-hustling. Hustlers are fun when you have nothing to lose.

Outside the window it's slowly getting light and I presume some time later the relative warmth will follow. But I don't care because in here it's warm and I've got somewhere to sit.

Outside the waiting room door 100+ passengers are milling around. A lot of them will have started their journey's at two or three this morning - so it's understandable that the atmosphere is somewhat subdued. These passengers are waiting at the gate of the Trans-Mongolian Express, or at least I think this is the gate, my Chinese is lousy and there does not appear to be a sign to indicate which platform this is. The train between Beijing and Ulan Bataar is known for its smuggling - looking at the passengers I'm trying to figure who out would want to smuggle what and where. Do a mental check of my own luggage and what would or could be considered contraband. With more of what I carry being digital I like having encrypted hard disks. But I like border crossings more than the risk of being stopped, the risk of that whatever they consider to be discoverable being discovered. I like that if the customs official doesn't like the way look I'd better have some time to kill.

My most memorable border crossing was being stopped traveling between Mexico and Guatemala on a high mountain pass. I'd just hitched up from Chichicastenango in a truck taking manual labourers across the Mexican border. It was shortly after dawn and the sun had yet to clear the mists clinging to the mountains. The labourers all sauntered through the border crossing and left in the only waiting truck - I would have to wait for the next ride. The Mexican customs official - a large gentleman with a handlebar mustache and, yes, mirror shades beckoned me into his office, a simple 1 roomed box. A large shotgun sat on the wall behind his desk more a symbol of his authority than the framed certificates or his uniform. Hollow authority? Hollow point authority? I couldn't imagine a situation where he would take it down and use it. He was laughing as he went through my luggage making jokes about bomb-es and co-ca-ine. That was when I first really understood the meaning of power and its possible implications. This happened a long time, 17 years ago, but I remember it vividly.

But later today when I leave China via Ereen I have nothing to fear. The most could-be-contraband part of my luggage - a wide range of data gathering equipment including more cameras than is healthy for one person will remain in Beijing. And my hard disks remain encrypted.

Posted by Jan at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2005

Transferring Substances or Data

Gas station on the outskirts of Beijing.

Four things stand out: Taxi has gas nozzle and redundant petrol cap; tank is noticeably slow to fill; nozzle requires a 'perfect' seal compared to petrol; 'gas station' is a for once accurate. And it's bitterly, bitterly cold.

Optimum ways to transfer substances, data?
What feedback to user that the process is proceeding as planned?
What are acceptable error rates for what is transferred?
Risk of errors and consequence when they occur?

Posted by Jan at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2005

Processes & Errors

Purchasing phone top-up credit from street vendor in Beijing.

The current process has plenty of scope for introducing errors. Alternatives available.

Posted by Jan at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

New Machines

Lets see how well context aids understanding...

What it is?
What it does?

Posted by Jan at 12:56 AM | Comments (5)

December 03, 2005

Artifacts

Momentarily seeing the near-present as the ancient past.

Workbench in a ceramics plant in Beijing.

Posted by Jan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

Carpet as Exterior/Posterior Comfort

Posted by Jan at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2005

Location Shifting

What percentage of mobile phone users have straps?
How is location of device in trouser pockets influenced by strap usage?
What are the design implications for device interaction and use?

More figuring out where, how, why people carry phones.

Posted by Jan at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

Temporary Protection

Arrive at restaurant. Coat goes on back of chair is covered by waiter by a tight fitting cloth. Coat stays close to owner, makes theft harder.

Posted by Jan at 12:12 PM | Comments (1)

November 30, 2005

Everything Just In Time

As we descend into Beijng the mental preparation for arrival kicks in. Leaving the plane's cocoon can be jarring and music is my way to ease into a new location, to regulate energy.

Literally 20 minutes to get from the plane through customs pick up luggage and clear the airport. Pre-filled forms is the biggest time saver - 3 forms to enter, 2 forms to leave. Taxi touts here are mild here compared to some cultures, but I enjoy seeing people hustle and they belong in this space. Beijing covered in a hazy fog. Ask the driver just to drive and on the way call colleague to figure out where the hotel is. Colleague speaks to driver. Arrive. Check-in, tune-out, good night.

Posted by Jan at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Custom No. Super Custom Yes

The photo above from a customer of Bowery Kitchen, Komazawa.

The super-customisation of mobile phones is gaining some traction here in Tokyo. Various shops in Shibuya will adorn your mobile phone (or iPod or digital camera) with rhinestones charging anything from 7,000 yen (50 Euro) for a pre-designed P900i cover to around 50,000 yen (350 Euro) for the full front and back design-to-order bling. Mostly but not exclusively for female clientel - men are starting to order quite gothic designs.

Jewel encrusting services can be found as an annex of some phone shops in popular shopping areas of Tokyo. Now nail shops are extending their offering to include mobile phone customisation - it's possible to order matching nail and phone designs.

(In my mind this is somehow all a logical progression from an analysis of 6447 used mobile phone covers and quick and dirty customisation)

I started out a sceptic but I have to admit some of the funkier pixel-art designs have started to grow on me.

Posted by Jan at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2005

Space & Learning

36 hours to go before the next trip - almost a full month on the road, in the skies and if things work out according to current loose plans - spending time at altitude in cold climes.

It all starts this week with a day of street research in Beijing. To be followed up by a couple of workshops - opportunities to catch up with colleagues, discuss past collaborations, learn, share, debate and then plan activites for next year. Maybe write the framework to a paper or two, or maybe something more.

After that it's anyone's guess. A ton of stuff to read, ideas to filter, write, spending time in places with people with strange faces, and along the way pushing to see what gives.

The interesting part will be to see what gives.

Posted by Jan at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2005

Learning to Push, Learning to Talk

Drumming up interest in the new push to talk services outside the teen girls shopping mecca - the 109 Building Shibuya. Step into a booth and have a pushing and talking walkthrough.

I'm intrigued to see how push to talk takes off in Japan and for that matter other new markets where it is rolled out. How use and perception of the service differs from the established service in the US? The push to talk use case is relatively easy to understand, but mainstream consumers will have relatively little cultural reference points other than movies, cop shows or occasionally from mountain rescue teams (Japan is covered in mountains so if you've ever been up one coming across walky-talky outfitted mountain-guides is not wholly uncommon). But this is a culture where people spend more time on crowded trains than in cars and where talking on the train is (still) largely socially unacceptable.

From a point of view of a foreigner the DoCoMo 902 series handsets are remarkable in their un-push-to-talk-esque - pretty much looking like every other handset out there. No chunky hand grips to support pushing and well, talking.

These forms are not following this function. What does that tell us?

When you're selling products into a global marketplace - how best to demonstrate new products, services and features to markets with relatively few cultural reference points?

Posted by Jan at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2005

Wayfinding

Mobile with GPS and map application. So you want to make a map reference in a hurry?

"It's easier to just ask someone"

In many instances so it is.

Posted by Jan at 08:32 PM | Comments (3)

November 22, 2005

Enriching the Purchasing Experience

Beyond practicality - the role of the calculator plays in enriching the purchasing experience - visualising the variations of cost, allowing the discount (or perceived discount) to be presented with a flourish. Is there room for this in the relatively sterile digital realm?

Posted by Jan at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

Registered Personalisation

Personalisation of cash register, snowboard shop, Kanda.

Posted by Jan at 08:27 PM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2005

Non-Literate Mobile Phone Communication

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.

Posted by Jan at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

Balanced

Scissors and material used to wrap purchases used together, stored together. The properties of the funnel condusive to being a scissor holder.

From behind the check-out of one of Tokyo's more interesting furniture stores.

Posted by Jan at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)

Summary Spaces

In cultures where people remove shoes at the entrance to the building the shoe removing space provides an easy to digest visual snapshot of the people that are already there. In environments where the people who inhabit the space are largely known - at home for example, not seeing a particular pair of shoes implies the person is not present. It also implies how the space can or cannot be used - 'mother is not yet home so I can get away with using the PlayStation a while'.

Incidentally my old kick-boxing dojo had a wonderful collection of shoes and boots at its entrance. There were usually one or two pairs of dainty high-heels whose owner's somehow transformed from petite Daikanyama shopperholics to grunting gladiators.

The shoes above were from a restaurant off the back of Shinjuku - construction workers on their lunch break.

Posted by Jan at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

Where People Carry Mobile Phones

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.

Posted by Jan at 09:19 AM | Comments (2)

November 15, 2005

Counter Intiuitive Experiences

The frame of these Swans goggles forms a perfect seal with the face, doing away with the need for rubber padding. Very comfortable, counter-intuitively so since the padding should make it more comfortable, right?

Any other examples of counter-intuitive experiences you can think of?

An hour to kill before my next meeting starts in the vicinity of Daikanyama pool. What to do?

Posted by Jan at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Exploratory Exposed

KDDI, the number two carrier here in Japan has obviously invested a large sum of money on their KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku to show off all things KDDI. The 5 story cylindrical building devotes space to their product line-up, a creation space, a stage for live events, a collaboration studio and on the 5th floor a 'relaxation studio' which is, um, another branch of Wired Cafe. It's unfair to judge from one visit but it was notable how empty the space was, and how little interaction it had and invited from the otherwise teeming Harajuku.

The building devotes some space to future technologies from KDDI R&D Laboratories most memorable of which is the break-dance robot. No that's not it's official name, but the demo from the studio staffer could have come straight out of my highschool playground - only needing a cardboard mat and cheering onlookers to complete the authentic break-dance experience. (Though how much time did the staffer need to have on her hands to hone her bust-a-move-robot-breakdance-skills?)

The serious-fun question in all of this is why and how to engage the public with what's coming out of the research lab?

Wireless watch has a video tour.

Posted by Jan at 10:34 AM | Comments (2)

November 11, 2005

Why do People Carry Mobile Phones?

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?.

Posted by Jan at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

(Lack of) Curves

Straight lines condusive to transcibing characters onto tarmac.

Posted by Jan at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2005

Simple Food

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)

Posted by Jan at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2005

Traces of Communication

What resources are consumed to generate what we want to communicate?
What trace is left by what we communicate?
Who has access to the traces of our communication?
And for how long?
Given the option, would user's like greater control over the trace of their communication?
What is the optimal way of presenting these options to users?

This gentleman writing with brush and water.

Posted by Jan at 07:51 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2005

Where You Can Expect People to Sit First

The properties and infrastructure in a space influencing where people choose to sit.

Waiting lounge for the San Fran - Tokyo flight the 3 males on the far left and right of the photo were clustered close to the power sockets (2 x laptop, 1 x dedicated DVD player), the couple reading - situated close to the check in gate with their backs to natural light.

I'm surprised no-one has tried to brand power sockets in locations like this - this socket sponsored by 'T-Mobile Wi-Fi access'. Micro targeted advertising should get interesting when it collides with the widespread adoption of IPv6.

Observed power socket clustering to charge mobile phones in a variety of cultures including Hangzhou train station and JFK Airport, below.

Posted by Jan at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

Search Engine

Flexible and appropriate use suggested through design of (bi-directional) search mats at airport security screening.

Had a pleasant discussion with a friendly TSA staffer before taking this photo. Their previous rules forbid the taking of photos in the searching area, though I presume someone has challenged this because now the rules are 'it's a public space so the taking of photos is ok'. What of the rights of the TSA workers not to appear in the photos?

Posted by Jan at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

Where To Stay When You Run a User Study

The location of where we stay on exploratory user studies can have a big impact on what we learn, the effectiveness of the team working together and being able to gather data we need to get. The preferred options are not as obvious as might first seem.

Pre-trip, one of the first tasks is to figure out what the optimum location will be to run user studies. If the study participants are likely to be traveling around by subway, in what part of the city are they located and where is a good axis point? Personally I prefer to be situated in a pedestrian-friendly location since it makes ad-hoc capturing of observational data that much easier. One method we use to find suitable ad-hoc study participants is to ride a bicycle around the city. Hotels usually allow bike parking near to the staff entrance and getting there is a good excuse to interact with and interview hotel staff members. (try and take a peek inside the security office if you get a chance - they are often located around the back of the building and security people can have interesting perspectives on human behaviour). From recent memory, the Hudson is particularly bike unfriendly.

Booking the flights my travel agent by default books a company recommended hotel usually located to be near to local company offices, airports or manufacturing sites and whilst comfortable are usually pretty lousy as a base for conducting user research (a pleasant exception is the Nikko Hotel here in San Francisco).

The research team tends to spend a lot of time coming and going from the hotel so the difference between a five minute walk and a 15 minute walk to where you do what you got to do - like breakfast meetings or other working space, can result in unproductive hour every day. Sometimes the walk time is good for gathering data, and getting a bit of exercise but I prefer to be given the choice of when and where. If you are hiring assistants paying their hotel even if they live in the city that you are researching has a number of benefits, not least of which is that they can sync and work to the rhythm of the rest of the research crew.