Purdey+Law

Lab 3

1) Jan Chipchase is 38 years old, a native Britain who worked for the Finnish Cell-phone Company for the last 7 years. He works for Nokia cell-phones and travels to various places around the world to gain knowledge about human behavior and report the information back to the company (to designers and technologists and marketing people who don’t travel). Jan is given the name “human behavior researcher” or also called “the user anthropologist.” He usually brings a big bodied nokia camera with many huge lenses to take pictures of things that might be instructive at any of nokia’s 9 design studios around the world. When he is not travelling around, he is usually at head office making presentations like those titled “Connect the Unconnected”. Based on Chipchase’s theory, cell-phone is becoming one fixed piece of our identity. One summer, through a monsoon-season downpour inside a one room home of a shoe salesman, he interviewed them in their daily lives and how much money they make. Only making 88$ per month, Chipchase was surprised at how they still owned a cell-phone. This cell-phone was purchased so that the father can make errands much easier for his boss, and sometimes uses it to call his wife, ringing a payphone 15 yards away from home. He would put the phone in a plastic bag when weather got bad to protect the cell-phone. People like Chipchase is a good listener, enlightening the company on presentations and reports on how people live and what they need from a cell-phone. Stories like the shoe salesman is told and shared to the company. Jan recently has been working on a project where him and his colleagues ran an open design studio in Buduburam, which is home to 40 000 people who fled from civil wars in Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. There is a sheet of fabric where it says “your dream phone, Share it with the world”. This allows people to draw their own dream phone, and a prize will be awarded. Sometimes new models of phones will be sent to Chipchase and him and designers will find foreigners to question and test these models. They will be futuristic design looking things. Such as the one button phone, it has an energy source charger therefore more convenient for the women who sits at the corner sifting rocks and twigs from corns in the corner of a market in Nima.

2) Fixed identity~ Owning a cell-phone helps enable uses lives in this specific instance “fixed identity” because the user can be reached, anytime and anywhere. Having a call back number is having a fixed identity point. A housekeeper can be called by customers to book a time rather than have her always waiting outside house to house to see when customers need her to do housekeeping. With a call-back number, also can be a means of keeping in touch with family members, and close friends or even as a business tool just like the housekeeper. Money Transfer This helps enable users lives especially those who don’t use banks. Chipchase came across a shared village phone using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place. It is like mobile banking, people can make purchases and payments or withdrawals through the phone. For example, if a son wants to transfer money to his mother, he makes a call to the operator, and lets them know how much money to transfer, than the operator will deliver the money minus a little commission. Mobile phone banking~ This helps enable users lives by allowing them to use phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased through a post office, phone kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their phones, they can make purchases, payments or withdraw as much cash they need. It is predicted that this mobile banking can bring excluded people into this economy very quickly simply because it is such a convenient and useful service, especially to those who don’t use banks and are very poor. Just In Time~ This helps enables users lives by making more efficient calls. With “just in time” calls, is very useful in advance planning of a designating specific time and place. If user is going the wrong direction while meeting someone, they can be quickly corrected and lead back onto the correct route. Using mobile phones, can be coordinated incrementally. Huge objects can be described as to where that person may be, so you can find that person much easier in a crowded huge place. Therefore meeting up with someone can be accomplished with more ease with the help of mobile cell-phones.