LIFT08: User experience session

11:30 at LIFT Conference.
From the program: "We will have two anthropologists, one working for Nokia in Tokyo (Younghee Jung) and another for Intel in Seattle (Genevieve Bell). Both will show us why observing users of technologies is important and how this brings insights for designing future products.

Paul Dourish, a researcher from University of California Irvine will then criticize how such results from anthropological studies are often translated into "implications for design", missing relevant insights from anthropologist's works."

Younghee on Nokia Open Studio: Vision by Relevance, Design for Use.

Younghee asked the questions "What does it take to host a design competition"?
The design competition was about imagined uses and designs of mobile phones in poor and emerging countries.

The design competition forms part of and supports ethnography research and street surveys.

> Local teams
> 3 locations: India, Brazil and Ghana
> Challenges: weather, security, electricity

Some of the participants' ideas:

India (Mumbai)

• Cloudy-Buddy Mobile (a mobile that you just have to point to the sky to forecast the weather). Why was that entry chosen? Very special was that it was a woman and the high weather dependency
• Eco-Cell (measuring air pollution so that people are more aware of environmental problem)

Ghana

• Four Star (host up to four separate SIM Cards, because of the four mobile carriers in Ghana).
• Combi (loudspeaker, to share media)
• Shape plays a major symbolic role. Durable, rugged mobile phones as phones are used for a long period of time in these communities.

Brazil (Rio)

• Mothers checking on kids as there are many underage mothers leaving their kids at home to go to school.
• Relying on solar charging.
• Pen drive phone (the only device to store electronic personal documents and information)

Genevieve on "Secrets, lies & digital perceptions"

A couple of my takeouts from Genevieve's speech:
History and cultural background of lies & secrets:

• Part of the job of the 3o sociologists at LIFT is to "find out what people could do with technology and how to make sense of it in their lives".
• For every mechanism that was created to e.g. locate someone with GPS, services were invited to deceive those services.
• Trends in people's habits and daily lives change far slower than technology.
• Cultural practices on lies and secrets: we tell somewhere between 6 and 200 lies per day. Men tell 20% more lies than women.

• "All information being available equally" as a fairly new notion of the internet. However many communities are not willing to give up on secrets.
• What appears to be in the public domain needs a lot of knowledge to actually fully understand the meaning behind an image of a neighborhood, a piece of art, etc.
• Online, people are celebrating secrets and lies
  

Paul on etnography & design
Got a bit tired, a lack of coffee, fresh air and something to eat. So just two links to researchers Paul talked about

Nancy D. Munn: aboriginal navigation
Liisa Malkki: national identity