The wacky bike was designed by IDEO people — I’m also impressed with their recent riff on the magazine quiz (maybe think madlibs): A Rockefeller sponsored guide to creating social impact with your design firm.
And the App:
FrontlineSMS is a thoroughly wonderful idea in many ways … I mean, if you’re into international rural research with mobile phones. A tool worth watching very closely, it’s what I think is the leading platform of the mobile research “industry”. (if there is such a thing.)
They just released a major new milestone and have bunch of great new branding. Great work, Ken!
On the occasion of amazing new videos of the latest prototype, it’s worth remembering that Android (not the just-barely-open iPhone) is the future of mobile development for the masses. Especially when combined with the hardware support of the Open Handset Alliance and the general propensity for open source projects to kick ass.
Just a quick open invitation, if you are in San Francisco this weekend:
UPDATE: Changed the time to 4pm.
I’m meeting with designer-researchers Niti Bahn and Dave Tait on Saturday, April 19th, at 6pm 4pm at Atlas Cafe in San Francisco (in the Mission). Come have a beer with us! We’re talking generally about designing and researching technologies for the poorest people in the world (the “bottom of the pyramid“). Africa, Asia, mobile phones, sustainable change, environmental technologies, research methodologies, product design, application development, user experience … lots of stuff.
Niti is a researcher, strategist and international rock star; Dave is an award-winning product designer and researcher based in South Africa. Developing world cell phone geeks, too. Check out this article they co-authored for a feel for what they are into: Design for the Next Billion Customers.
If you’re interested, email me, or just show up!
Oh and, we’re doing some planning for a BarCamp unconference of the same themes this summer. Let me know if you would be interested in attending or supporting an event like that. Probably Late June or July.
Here’s my Reader’s Digest version, since I know you graphing how much time you spend on blogs.
About Chipchase, who really is a super-nice guy:
“To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia. …
About getting over your hatred of your cellphone (cursed device efficiency-obsession). This bit hit a nerve for me:
Understanding [stuff] requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. … Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.
On the incredible value that can be provided by something so simple, like SMS:
“… public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
On Microfinance and the bottom of the Pyramid:
… A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.
On “sente,” which as Chipchase put it the other night, “turns anyone with a cellphone into an ATM:”
Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”
And then my favorite part, thinking about the pace of change and the oh noes! of the human condition:
“People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”
And then my other favorite part, their research methodology, an “open design studio” in Ghana:
“There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted lettering that read: “Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.” It went on to describe how the community was invited to come share ideas and drawings for the ideal mobile phone. Prizes were offered. So far, 140 people had shown up to sketch their dream phone.”
And on the Election Violence in Kenya (check out Ushahidi.com created by Erik Hersman, who told me that this article had been published today!):
“After the government imposed a media blackout in late December last year, Kenyans sought news and information via S.M.S. messages on their phones and used them to track down friends and family who’d fled their homes. Many also reported receiving unsolicited text messages to take up arms. The government responded with an admonition, sent, of course, via S.M.S.: ‘The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any S.M.S. that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.’ “
Very much looking forward to this Adaptive Path event (San Francisco) tomorrow:
Street Hacks and Long Wows - An Evening with Chipchase, Burns, and Schauer
How long have you been using your current cell phone? And what happened to your previous model? If you live in a country like India, China or Ghana the answer is likely to involve the vibrant used phone market and, somewhere along the line the informal repair cultures - guys on the street who appear able to fix pretty much anything using little more than a flat surface a screwdriver and knowledge.
This presentation will highlight the mobile phone hacking skills available on the streets of cities from Accra and beyond, the sophisticated ecosystem of reverse engineered repair manuals and highlight how it challenges our thinking about what it means to make, distribute our products. The presentation will introduce Remade - a phone made from upcycled and recycled products.
Now this is what I am talking about: A mobile phone based API for doing things like managing quantitative research projects. Supports a bazillion types of phones. Developed by a South African company. You own your own data. Sounds like a brilliant new project and I look forward to hearing more about it.
The platform was developed for Africa, with all of the barriers that normally come to mind: types of phones used, bandwidth availability and user patterns.Erik Hersman
Now the exciting part is that this isn’t just a single application, but rather a platform for application development; that’s Populi.net.
Then there is Mobile Researcher(what I think is the first and only app thus far developed for it). Mobile Researcher sounds itself really amazingly cool — you develop surveys on the web and then anyone can take them with their cellphones. They’ve got an interesting case study up on the web featuring the South African Medical Research Council.
Quoting directly from their case study, it’s obvious that there are some exciting ideas going on — I hope to see some further news that reinforces these findings (the only thing that makes me wary is that they have no pricing information, and no screen shots of the survey builder interface):
Low cost Nokia 2626 handsets were successfully used by field workers to conduct surveys. Several field workers had never even sent an SMS before.
On average, over 400 households were surveyed every day with data available for analysis and reporting before the field workers returned to the field the following day.
Research staff and management were able to isolate and rectify issues whilst the study was in progress.
Field worker productivity and quality was monitored on a daily basis for training and remuneration purposes.
More than 25,000 households were surveyed in under 3 months.
I am obsessed with cell phones right now. Mostly I bloody *hate* them. I haven’t had one for six months, but work made me get one last week. So since they made me get one I am lobbying to get into some cell-phone-type research, partly to figure out my personal issues with cellular voice communication, most mostly because, clearly, undoubtedly, they are the most important technology in the world: they are the network of the developing world. As a BBC article put it a couple weeks ago: “”it’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album …”
“It’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer.The Invisible Computer Revolution
My question is: where the hell are the tools for people who use cellphones in this way? (In particular, where are the banking tools and educational tools?) In the first world we’ve got $600 iphones that can read your freaking mind. But a simple flashcard application for learning a few of the 62 languages spoken in Kenya? It’s not quite as sexy.
So this is the part that I am really obsessing over, as a developer. It just seems to me that there is huge opportunity to really do some huge good by, essentially, hacking on SMS. Or, sure, wait a few years and use cell phones as a proper thin client. (But im more interested in the ultra ultra thin approach, something that would work with one of the classic Nokias, which are used everywhere in Africa . Design for maximum constraints, right?)
Anyway, new content. Here’s a fantastic video from Jan Chipchase at TED, a hero of cellphone ethnography. My favorite line: “”if you want a big idea you need to embrace everyone on the planet…. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. Our [rich people] relevance is about being able to listen.”
Sometime about 5 years ago people began to realize the frustrating limits of web development because the existing standards were so poorly followed by existing browsers. It was something like what Frost said about “poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.”
Which is to say, no fun at all. Online communication has progressed steadily since then, and now we have wonderful fruits like “AJAXy goodness” and other Web 2.0 technologies to reap. So take a break from griping about Netscape vs. Internet Explorer.
But Google Maps (etc.) being accomplished, we’re looking for ever greater technologies. The next frontier of web development is the mobile browser — the web in a cell phone.
The concept of the mobile web has been huge this year, and it is now taken as a fact that most internet users in the next 5 years will be getting online for the first time through their cell phones.
And so, with that in mind, here’s a great series of articles from designer Cameron Moll that looks at the background of the mobile web and explores the specifics of developing +designing reliable, readable sites for really, really small screens.
How do we designers and code slingers cope with the current state? What slings and what doesn’? This article attempts to present technical advice on a superficial level.
How do you make a regular cellphone location-aware? Apparently, you monitor the records indicating which tower the phone is on. Movement from one tower to the next can give highly accurate readouts on the movement of individuals and crowds.
I wouldn’t think that this would give you manageable data that was accurate enough to do anything with, but it turns out that, yet again, profit motives will find a way. Companies are working with cellphone carriers to track traffic patterns to prevent traffic jams. You will sign up for a fee and get readouts of the general direction of people.
This seems more significant, however, because of the general applicability of this method. Apparently it is even possible to tell with some accuracy wether the cellphone traveling — which doesn’t even have to be turned on (!) — is in the pocket of a person traveling by bike, by foot, or by car. This would allow, perhaps, for sophisticated monitoring of disaster relief efforts, for example.
Fascinating, but also, for some, Orwellian. Privacy advocates are worried about this emergence of broader monitoring applications, particularly in the instance of a developing protests. Recent spontaneous protests in Latin America and China come to mind. Police would theoretically be able to tell where protesters were convening just by looking at changes in the traffic patterns of cell phones.
It’s hard not to imagine some hollow volcano where we’re all being tracked like so many schools of fish, but there must be some useful applications here as well. We’ll see how the market develops.
“Maryland and Virginia are testing technology that allows them to monitor traffic by tracking cellphone signals and mapping them against road grids.”
Today’s New York Times carries a front-page article about the growth of the cell phone industry in Africa.
The article is as well-written a summary of the communications crisis in Africa as I have ever read — though it is an undeniably, perhaps inexplicably, upbeat assessment of the curent growth trend in cell phone use.
The article begins by describing the difficulties faced by a rural farmer in Johnanesburg:
On this dry mountaintop, 36-year-old Bekowe Skhakhane does even the simplest tasks the hard way.
Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook, she gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles.
But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works in a steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she does what many in more developed regions do: she takes out her mobile phone.
Author Shanon LaFranierie did a great job of putting this together, I think, but again the upbeat assessment tends to make the issue more of a spectacle than an outrage. Which it is. Take, for example, the fact that the woman described in the lead actually has the money for only five minutes of calls per month — a pretty slim communication system indeed.
There is also the fact that while Africa now has the highest percentage of cell phone users relative to land lines, that doesn’t mean much when only one in 30 people has a land line. And the fact that less than 60% of Africa can get any cellphone signal at all is rather sobering.
And yet, there is an undeniable fact of real growth — economic, social, educational — that is occuring because of the powerful effect that even a slight improvement in communication can bring. At least when the context is dire poverty, the impact of just a few cellphones can be dramatically disproportinate.
No doubt, mobile phones will be near the top of the list [of development technologies] — but that list also includes $100 laptops, wind-up electricity generators, low-cost community radio transmitters, and the timeless ham radio. So let’s not make policy decisions under the assumption that mobile phones are the only tool necessary for bridging the digital divide.
A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh. These are people who otherwise would have no digital communications, and Quadir feels that their new phones are empowering them more than the development strategies of the last 60 years.
The approach is eloquently summed up on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog as a bottom-up approach to economic development. Here’s a bit from his recent post:
Iqbal points to a top-down approach favored by the World Bank and others and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way - technological empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.
I love it.
But I always find it disturbing that his bottom line is productivity — the extent to which their communication means that they are participating in the market.
I write this in spite of the obvious fact that the real goal of progressive ICT is the empowerment of people, ie, the elimination of poverty. So there is always an element of market-think undergirding the need for communication.
But by understanding people’s lives in terms of an economic equation, there’s some unquantifiable (romantic, perhaps) aspect of communications-based development that is lost. Because, after all, of we were all well fed and clothed, we’d still be suffering without the ability to communicate.
Author Shanon LaFranierie did a great job of putting this together, I think, but again the upbeat assessment tends to make the issue more of a spectacle than an outrage. Which it is. Take, for example, the fact that the woman described in the lead actually has the money for only five minutes of calls per month — a pretty slim communication system indeed.