May 14, 2007
You know when it feels like somebody’s watching you . . .
A glimpse from The Times on everyone's favorite Nokia observer,Jan Chipchase, as he tracks human behaviour around the world to help to design the phones of the future.
" ... In the past year, he has left his Tokyo base to visit 15 countries. He has studied the behaviour of mobile-phone owners from the shanty towns of Soweto to the bedrooms of Seoul’s painfully tech-savvy teens, trying to work out what handsets will look like 15 years from now.
... His basic mission, however, is to root out the motivation behind people’s behaviour, on the basis that it will not alter by the year 2022.
He is particularly interested in ad hoc mobile banking that has sprung up in Uganda, which uses prepayment systems as deposit accounts and relies on shopowners to make good promises to turn credits back into cash. “The question is: how do we design for people’s needs?” he says.
Mobile phone straps may be seen as “for girls” by male Londoners, but are all the rage in “collectivist societies”, such as China. So, if phone straps tap into human behaviour in a way that will make them an enduring feature, can mobile makers take the idea forward by turning them into part of a device’s display, perhaps?“ "Technology,” Mr Chipchase says, “changes quickly. Human behaviour changes pretty slowly.”
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