[tt] NS: Interview: The cellphone anthropologist

Fri Jun 20 01:19:49 UTC 2008

Interview: The cellphone anthropologist
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826602.000&print=true
11 June 2008
Jason Palmer

Most of us take mobile phones for granted. Not so for Jan Chipchase,
a design researcher for Nokia, who travels the globe exploring how
people use their mobile devices, discovering how to make them
better, how to reach the billions of people who don't own a phone -
and learning a whole lot about people along the way. Jason Palmer
caught up with him in Japan - by phone of course - and found that
nothing about the mobile phone is as straightforward as it seems

Watch a slideshow of Chipchase's research images

What exactly do you do?

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability
experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called
"corporate anthropology", but personally I'm more comfortable with
"design research", because I'm not an anthropologist by training.
We're interested in design and in how what we design affects
people's lives. The tough part of the job is using the data we
collect to inform and inspire how my colleagues think, and in
turning this research into new ideas.

But you started out studying economics.

My first job out of university was designing software for an
economics project, but I realised that I didn't know what I was
doing, so I took a master's in user interface design. In 2000 a job
in the usability group at Nokia came up. At the time I didn't even
own a mobile phone. The remit was to carry out "user experience
research" - they wanted to ask some really basic questions. So we
pitched a year-long international study on what objects people carry
with them and why.

How do phones fit in?

The common denominator between cultures, regardless of age, gender
or context is: keys, money and, if you own one, a mobile phone. Why
those three objects? Without wanting to sound hyperbolic,
essentially it boils down to survival. Keys provide access to warmth
and shelter, money is a very versatile tool that can buy food,
transport and so on. A mobile phone, people soon realise, is a great
tool for recovering from emergency situations, especially if the
first two fail.

You've found that mobile phones do more than provide a means of
communication?

We've started to see the mobile phone being used as the primary form
of projecting your identity. For instance, if you live in a
community with no street signs, because your street is off the map
or not officially recognised, you find people are writing their
phone numbers above their door.

How do you respond to people who say you are just trying to thrust
Nokia phones into the hands of people who don't yet own one - often
because they're too poor?

In the past few years, we've done a lot of work with people in
so-called emerging markets. A mobile phone is just as valid for a
farmer on the outskirts of New Delhi as a banker in New York. What
we've discovered is that for people on the lowest rungs of society,
the mobile phone actually has a disproportionately great benefit to
them compared with the banker in New York, because they have fewer
alternatives. We do research in such communities because these are
the places in which we can best learn about the kinds of mobile use
that will become mainstream in other parts of the world. We find
these communities to be incredibly innovative in the way they use
their mobile phones.

What uses surprised you?

In a country like Uganda, most mobile phones are prepay. What we saw
was that people are using their phones as a kind of money transfer
system. They would buy prepaid credit in the city, ring up a phone
kiosk operator in a village, read out the number associated with
that credit so that the kiosk operator could top up their own phone,
then ask that the credit be passed on to someone in the village -
say, their sister - in cash.

Do people customise the phones too?

In some countries people are incredibly price-conscious and measure
costs in seconds and cents. In Ghana we saw that people tend to buy
two or more SIM cards, one for each network provider. When they're
calling a number belonging to a particular network, they'd use that
company's SIM. Some guys have a small metal sleeve that has a little
bit of circuitry in. They can take your SIM cards, strip away the
plastic, squeeze two of the SIM circuit boards into one and fit that
new dual card into a phone.

In most of the developing world there is an informal repair culture
run by "street hacks" who learn how to make phones last longer than
their natural lifetime. Four years ago in India you could find badly
printed DIY phone repair manuals in English, Hindi and Chinese, but
two years later they had been turned into high-quality computerised
versions. Basically, if a way of changing, fixing or improving a
popular model of mobile phone is discovered in any of the hacking
communities around the world on Monday, by Friday it'll be on the
streets of somewhere like Ghana.

With this level of informal innovation going on, can you bring
anything extra to the table?

I'm not going to give you the bland corporate answer - "we do this
research and then six months later a product drops off the factory
line that perfectly reflects our vision" - because the world is much
messier and more interesting than that. But, for instance, we did a
study on phone sharing in Uganda and Indonesia, and within a year -
which is really quick when you're talking about hardware changes -
we had two products out which support multiple address books,
allowing people to share a device within a family or a company while
giving them a degree of privacy.

Many potential phone owners in the developing world are illiterate.
What about them?

There are around 800 million illiterate people worldwide, according
to the UN, so we have carried out a lot of research into how people
who can't read communicate using mobile phones. We fed that back to
the device designers, so the phones could be designed to work
better. But we didn't want to create a phone specifically for those
who can't read - they're not going to buy this kind of phone because
of the social stigma it would carry.

Your blog Future Perfect ("about the collision of people, society
and technology") includes a lot of your musings about what you see
on your travels, but poses more questions that it answers.

I'm pretty bad at shoehorning life into what amounts to lifeless
journal and conference submissions. I mean, how do you take the
essence of what's out there, the richness of life, and put it on
paper? I don't think you can. The motivation behind the blog is that
I do something that totally fascinates me, and I'm lucky to be well
resourced and to work with very talented people. I want to be able
to communicate some of that. It's not about saying what the answers
are; it's about asking the questions and maybe some of those will
stick in people's minds and they'll ask those questions in their own
contexts.

Do you ever go anywhere without a mobile phone?

Sure. When I'm mountain climbing and when I want to spend
uninterrupted time with close friends and family.

Watch a slideshow of Chipchase's research images

Profile

Of English and German parentage, 38-year-old Jan Chipchase grew up
in London and studied economics at London Guildhall University,
going on to do a master's in user interface design in 1992. He then
worked at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the
University of Bristol. In 1999 he moved to Japan, where he still
lives, and joined Nokia's usability group. He became a member of the
Nokia design group last year.

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Weblinks

Design research presentation by Jan Chipchase
http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/presentations/JanChipchase_NokiaConnection2007_vFinal_External.ppt
Jan Chipchase's talk at the TED conference 2007
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/190
Mobile phone lifeline for world's poor, BBC news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6339671.stm