October 21, 2004
Stalking the Wild Youth: Mobile Phone Design for Teenagers
Watching teens use phones in their natural environments gave a group of researchers insights into how future handsets aimed at the youth market should be designed. Mark Frauenfelder reports for TheFeature.com.
"While observing teens in their natural habitat – campus commons, dining halls, parks, hallways – the researchers came to the conclusion that mobile phones were not only used as tools for transmitting and receiving information, but were also used as tools to establish and maintain the status of social networks.
Mobiles facilitated what the researchers described as the “obligations of exchange.” In particular, students have a social contract with each other to give and accept “gifts” in the form of text messages. The gift's value is derived in part from the message's content, but it also comes from the fact that the gift was given at all, regardless of its content." [...]
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