the ethnography of essential objects

11/12/2005 07:03:00 PM (1)
Jan Chipchase who works in user experience for Nokia based in Tokyo has a blog called Future Perfect. In her latest post, she describes an ethnography project that she worked on a few years ago. The objective of the study was to understand what objects people considered essential to their lives and how they behaved with them. The most important objects common across all countries were keys, phones and money. Coming out of this research they developed some neat terminology to analyze what they found.

Center of Gravity

The most likely place where these objects were kept. This includes in a bag, on low tables or on the side of a desk.

The Point of Reflection

The moment when you check to see where all your essential objects are and if they are all in place. Commonly called "panic" for most of us.

Range of Distribution

The range of distance that these objects are scattered over.

The research also uncovered that people quickly convert taxis to private space in the way they organize their objects, but "a pressured sequence of tasks at the end of the journey such as thinking what to do next on arrival at the destination and paying the driver, help explain why mobile phones are often left in taxis."

This post provides a glimpse into the type of studies that Nokia is doing and it's interesting to see the importance of ethnography in its research. Now, if only they used this research and built a device to help people find their keys faster.

via kathrynyu
Tags:

Comments
Portable Effects
See also Rachel Strickland's Portable Effects project: http://www.portablefx.com/
Posted by Ryan Shaw on 11/30/2005 11:23 PM
It appears you don't have Flash installed.
Email this article to a friend
Send an email to a friend with a link to this article. Items with an asterisk (*) are required.

Your Name:
*

Your Email:
*

Friend's Name:
*

Friend's Email:
*