South Africa Archives
Toilets, Muslim Toilets
Aug 18, 2006 | 4 Comments
Must dig up the collection of different types of waiting rooms in China and India.
You'll Like This. Or Not.
Aug 17, 2006
Visitors to Pretoria Airport are greeted by signs pointing them to turn on their mobile phone's Bluetooth connectivity. Accepting the connection results in an animated GIF being sent to the phone - with special offers on duty free products.
In our (naturally wonderful) wireless world the process of discovery, knowing what services are currently available in proximity is far from painless. Whilst I rarely buy duty free I suspect that most people would find the 'special offer' underwhelming given the steps required to receive (even if connectivity was switched on) and the risks associated with accepting gifts from strangers.
Purveyors of location based services may be interested in the 2003 NTT DoCoMo's comprehensive R-Click trial in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills. By signing up to R-Click and completing a profile of interests participants were offered three services: location based advertising according to personal preferences (Koko Dake Click); information based on what was shown on LCD displays (Mite Toru Click) for example a url related to the advertising that was displayed when you were present is sent to your i-Mode equipped phone; and finally a services that monitored where the participant was going and tried to predict what offers or items of interest they would want mailed to their phone (Buratto). In other words the system tracks your every move (not dis-similar to CCTV) except that this information can be cross checked with your profile, your mobile phone, and to the profile that the system builds around your behaviours. To be fair R-Click was a trial and trials are there to, well, try out stuff. And yes, its opt-in. But the approach in the R-Click trial, in particular the Buratto service highlights a fundamental assumption about privacy, or lack of - you are there to be tracked, sold to, and you pay for the priviledge because i-mode is a pay-per-packet service.
How well did the Roppongi Hill R-click service work? From my own experience, even with my profile of interests and knowing where I was heading it was unable to provide relevant recommendations and in many ways it highlighted the challenge of providing the right person with the right information at the right time. Getting it even marginally wrong results in an unwanted intrusion.
Would I accept future special offers at Pretoria Airport? Only out of boredom. But Airports are far from boring - there are simply too many interesting people to observe.
Bootnote: Can you build a service based on killing boredom? Undoubtedly.Who is motivated by what reasons to create boredom scenarios? Cue delayed flights, trains, busses...
Cape Town Builders Have More Fun
Jul 09, 2006
Volumes Enabling Volumes
Jul 06, 2006
The physical size and volume of devices waiting to be repaired and cannabalized compared to the equivilent number of mobile phones (photo above Soweto, below Kampala) . A better demonstration perhaps of the issue of physical size, cubic volume and numbers (volumes) of objects to be repaired first touched upon here.
Delegating Panic
Jul 03, 2006
Seeing this switch in an upscale Cape Town hotel reminds me that almost everything, barring entertainment and biological functions, can be delegated. The button in question is for guests who have had too much of the sauna heat.
The question is who is willing pay what to have which tasks carried out on their behalf?
Cultures of Repair, Innovation
Jul 03, 2006 | 4 Comments
Update: a slightly more print friendly version of this post appears here and the slides of the presentation can be downloaded via here [4MB].
In an effort to understand the total user experience I've taken time out during recent field studies in emerging markets to explore local repair cultures. The journey has taken me to cities such as Chengdu, Delhi, Ulan Bataar, Ho Chi Minh and Lhasa with recent brief stopovers in Kampala and Soweto. They all contain clusters of shops and market stalls selling a mixture of used and new mobile phones, and whilst (in this instance) size does not necessarily matter, they often operate on a scale not seen in cities such as London or Tokyo. The mobile phone market around Chengdu's Tai Shen Lan Lu Market for example stretches across number of streets and shopping arcades and includes 100's of small shops and stalls. If you want a snapshot of urban mobile phone consumers in emerging markets this is a good place to start.
What sets these locations apart from cities in more 'emerged' markets? Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally. Repairs are often carried out with little more than a screwdriver, a toothbrush (for cleaning contact points) the right knowledge and a flat surface to work on. Repair manuals (which appear to be reverse engineered) are available, written in Hindi, English and Chinese and can even be subscribed to, but there is little evidence of them being actively used. Instead many of the repairers rely on informal social networks to share knowledge on common faults, and repair techniques. It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open the manual itself. Delhi has the distinction of also offering a wide variety of mobile phone repair courses at training institutes such as Britco and Bridco turning out a steady flow of mobile phone repair engineers. To round off the ecosystem wholesalers' offer all the tools required to set up and run a repair business from individual components and circuit board schematics to screwdrivers and software installers.
How are mobile phone repair cultures different from the everyday repair shops for other mainstream electronics filled with televisions and video recorders? For a start consider the volumes of mobile phones in the marketplace compared to other electronics. Network effects soon kick in - it's easier to find a dead RAZR to cannabalise for spares than spares for a Sony DVD drive drive quite simply because there's more of them about. The physical size of the products to be repaired is also an factor - consider the space required to store and repair 200 mobile phones vs CRT televisions. As objects that many consider essential tools for everyday life mobile phones are carried, dropped, sat on, run over, submerged in a wide variety of situations leading to use cases outside the parameters of most phones. Finally, for many emerging market consumers the phone is considered an essential tool for conducting a successful business whether it's a boda-boda driver in Kampala (gentleman on moped in photo, below) or a midwife in Xiamen. If a person has the choice between repairing a television or a (shared) mobile phone which do you think he or she would choose first?
Each of the cities mentioned above offers more formal repair services, usually officially through customer care service centers, but the scale and sophistication of what is on offer informally is way beyond what many readers of Future Perfect will be familiar. And yes, many of the places mentioned already have networks to (from my observations) efficiently recycle, repair and re-use a wide variety objects including electronics . But in the spirit of the Future Perfect let's start with a very basic question - why do these informal repair cultures exist at all? What is so different between London and Lhasa or Helsinki and Ho Chi Minh?
The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity - highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee - having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second or third+ ownership. In many cases these users cannot afford to be without their mobile phone, not in the social sense of being out of touch (which is valid enough), but in many instances because their livelihoods depend on it. On the supply side there is a ready pool of sufficiently skilled labour, ready access to tools, components and above all knowledge.
It's worth acknowledging that grey and black goods and services are also part of the mobile phone market ecosystem - whether it's passing faked goods off as originals or offering pirated software. Some markets also sell a wide variety of phones that copy the industrial designs of other products, examples are shown here and and example of how it can unfold here (these two links are unrelated). These are however, only a part of the whole market ecosystem and from my understanding are small in scale within the context of the physical markets' themselves, compared to the repair services on offer. And before you ask - no, I'm not arguing that piracy is a minor issue.
For consumers the informal repair culture is largely convenient, efficient, fast and cheap, reducing the total cost of ownership for people for whom a small drop in price may make the difference between having or not having a phone. The culture of repair also increases the lifetime of products lowering their environmental impact (though this could be offset by other factors such as inefficiency of using old batteries).
What can we learn from informal repair cultures? Aside from the benefits, what are the risks for consumers and for companies whose products are repaired, refurbished and resold? Given the benefit to (bottom of the pyramid) consumers are there elements of the repair ecosystem that can be exported to other cultures? Can the same skills be applied to other parts of the value chain? And, turning to my original interest in this topic and the work we do in the Mobile HCI Group, given the range of resources and skills available what would it take to turn cultures of repair into cultures of innovation?
I'm at Cape Town University today discussing qualitative research methods and Informal Repair Cultures. The slides of the presentation can be downloaded via here [4MB download] and related presentations here.
Transparency
Jun 22, 2006
Vending machine for coffee in a Soweto petrol station. Simply select an appropriate amount of coffee, lactose and non-dairy-milk-substitute. Despite what it's selling I like the transparency and frankness of this device - you get what you get. Compare it to coffee machines covered in photos of frothy cappucinos and french waiters.
Most the petrol stations here served a decent fresh brew.
Security & Telephony
Jun 22, 2006
Despite the sign (above) this location did not offer connectivity. When are signs (merely) advertisements?
And for the marketeers amongst you, when are advertisements merely signs?
Minimising Space for Interaction
Jun 21, 2006
Defensive infrastructure designed to channel interaction into a narrow space. Notice the step designed to support smaller customers, and the effect the step has on residents who are tall enough not to have to use it.
Access to Power, Phone Charging Services
Jun 21, 2006
Car batteries are the default power supply for squatter settlements around Soweto - newly charged batteries being delivered (photo above).
Below, a local shop keeper offers phone charging services to local Kliptown residents. For 5 Rand (0.1 Euro) you can leave your phone for the day, but with no guarentees. For people without reliable access to power, the risk of theft or damage vs. a flat battery.
The Scale of the Issue
Jun 21, 2006
Advertisement discouraging the hacking of local electricity.
Risk of Suffocation
Jun 21, 2006
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