Design for the information society: What can we learn from the Nokia experience? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Design as Regulation: Towards a regulatory ecology of the mobile phone
Mobile phones have become one of the most unsustainable consumer goods. New initiatives, such as Fairphone and Puzzelphone, are working on a more sustainable mobile phone design. This paper introduces the notion of lifecycle thinking to take sustainability beyond the product towards the larger product-system. Social and environmental sustainability needs to be addressed in the whole lifecycle of the mobile phone. This paper explores the opportunities and limitations of design as regulation. The relational concepts of script and affordance help to provide a non-deterministic account of design as regulation. The particular case of the Fairphone 2, a smartphone based on social and environmental values, will be discussed to investigate design as regulation. The notions of regulatory ecology and regulatory patching are introduced as tools to explore opportunities for constructing a more desirable regulatory regime.
Making sense of innovations: A comparison of personal computers and mobile phones
Despite revolutionary expectations about information and communication technologies (ICT), the academic understanding of what exactly these technologies bring to individual lives remains incomplete. We know very little about how individuals perceive the value of ICT products, and even less about the process by which these value perspectives are built. This paper contributes to addressing these gaps. It presents an empirical study comparing the perceived use-value of personal computers and mobile phones. The findings show that the day-to-day value of innovations is deeply embedded in the existing and newly emerging social contexts. Thus, societal transformations, such as becoming an information society, cannot be reduced to matters of technological possibilities. The paper also builds a construct for the sense-making process that clarifies that compared to mobile phones, computers are more difficult to position in mind, purchase and use, require more support from social contacts and are only meaningful in selective contexts.
Daily life, not markets: customer-centered design
Journal of Business Strategy, 2007
Purpose – As companies try to gain a deeper understanding of consumers, they are increasingly turning to user-observation and ethnographic processes. However, because of this work is normally done in an informal manner, it tends to only have value for the small number of team members working on a particular project. This paper seeks to describe a method that is much more structured than normal processes, allowing companies to conduct observational research that is able to be large scale and reused. Design/methodology/approach – Ethnographic studies are not only heuristic in nature, usually requiring the research team to develop frameworks and descriptions that are idiosyncratic to a particular project. This makes comparing data from different studies and doing large-scale projects impractical. This paper describes a set of common frameworks and a research protocol that provides standards that are relevant across projects and teams. Findings – Descriptions of projects using this proc...
How iPhone innovators changed their consumption in iDay2: Hedonic post or brand devotion
International Journal of Information …, 2011
Using netnographic evidence on iPhone usage, this study suggests that devoted and innovative consumers adopt and use new technology for hedonic experiences and social positioning, which generates experiential outcomes. This article presents an interpretive analysis of consumption behavior of iPhone users after their experience with iPhone v1 and its successive iterations, prior to the release of Apple's latest model the iPhone 4. The day the iPhone v1 was released was dubbed iDay1 by Apple brand aficionados, and the anticipated release date of the iPhone 4 iDay2. While the original iPhone v1 was seen as very cutting edge, successive releases (the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS), were far less innovative. Each successive iPhone release has not had as devout a following as the original. This raises the question: will innovation seeking consumers abandon the iPhone for a newer, more technologically innovative device? This study suggests that innovators prefer really new products instead of upgraded ones, because they cannot see the advantage of using an upgraded version of a product which has already been widely adopted.
Beyond Users: Grounding Technology in Experience
2008
This thesis goes beyond a user-centred design approach to explore potential future applications and modes of interaction. With several design cases, we investigate how early technology ideas can be matched with a specific practice to inspire novel design. This involves learning about existing experiences, interests and activities that can be relevant for a potential application, but which are not necessarily found among the intended users. Starting with early technology ideas and then finding a suitable practice to learn from is an alternative perspective of design activities. This can be useful for researchers and designers in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) who are interested in complementing approaches compared to user-centred design. Our approach is also relevant for researchers that face technology-driven starting points, and want to investigate future applications by grounding the design in existing practices. Many people have contributed to this thesis. This includes advisors and colleagues who have read, commented on or discussed my work, as well as family and friends that have supported me with love and understanding. I cannot mention all of you in person here, but I still want to say a big thank you! First of all, I would like to thank my closest advisor Lars Erik Holmquist. Thank you for great support, co-authoring on papers, and for the inspiring and fun times at the Future Applications Lab. It has been a fantastic journey. I also want to thank Kristina Höök for fruitful discussions and help with some of the arguments in this thesis. Furthermore, I want to thank Bo Dahlbom for thoughtful early support in this process. A great thank you to all my present and former colleagues at the Future Applications Lab for all the great times we have shared, the amazing travelling memories and friendship. Thank you especially Maria Håkansson, Lalya Gaye, Mattias Jacobsson, Mattias Rost and Tobias Skog, for being excellent coauthors, and for all the fun we have had. I also want to thank Katarina Walter, Panajotis Mihalatos, Pontus Munck, Fredrik Helin, Theresia Höglund and Robert Zackaroff for their work in some of the projects. Thank you all present and former colleagues at the Viktoria Institute, the IT University of Göteborg, in the Mobile Services project and later at the Mobile Life Centre. Working with you has always been inspiring, rewarding and fun. Also, I would like to thank Ann Andreasson for administrative and other support throughout the years at the Viktoria Institute. And, a very special thank you to Mathias, for tremendous love, understanding, everyday support and encouragement.
Am i getting it or not?" the practices involved in "trying to consume" a new technology
2012
In recent years, high rates of failure of technology-based products have spurred interest in understanding the psychological and sociological barriers to consumer learning of technological innovations. The main focus of this research was to examine the learning process and consumers' coping mechanisms when they encounter technological innovations. A study was designed to understand the learning process in real time as consumers engaged in a set of activities associated with the novel interface. The goal was to investigate how consumers cope with high levels of complexity during their initial interactions with a technology-based product and how their coping strategies may hinder the learning process. Verbal protocol measures were used in order to understand the consumer's learning process as he or she interacts with a technology-based product in real time. They were told that they would have to think aloud while performing certain tasks and that their thoughts would be recorded for further analysis. The personal digital assistant (PDA) with handwriting recognition as its interface was chosen for this study. The main task for the participants was to learn how to use Graffiti writing-i.e., the product's handwriting recognition software. We proceeded to a thematic analysis in which interpretations were generated by the researchers going back and forth between the transcribed texts, the developing interpretation, the new interface itself, and also the relevant literature. The results suggest that the new product's interface serves to structure the consumer's learning process even as he or she responds in relatively unstructured ways. The findings identify three basic factors that interfere with the learning process during consumers' initial interactions with a technological innovation: interface and functionality practices, social influence, and causal attributions. Specifically, the results suggest that in designing technology-based products there is a gap between the levels of know-how between the manufacturer and the user. The challenge for manufacturers is to understand the consumer's learning experience and coping strategies and provide mechanisms that would make the transition easy and intuitive. This could be achieved by incorporating into the new interface some degree of flexibility that will allow consumers to modify tasks based on their preferences, or by including indicators that will provide feedback to the user. Furthermore, in the context of communication strategies, in order to minimize the negative impact that prior knowledge and social influence may have on learning, marketers could communicate specific steps describing how to use the new interface.
Business as Unusual: Designing products with consumers in the loop
2017
This feasibility study was one of five feasibility studies on re-distributed manufacture, consumer goods and big data. The study looked mainly into: How could we engage users in NPD in future re-distributed models of sustainable production and consumption? To answer this question, the study mapped the different product-people interactions to identify the challenges and opportunities for user engagement in design and manufacture, to further investigate their application in order to bridge the gap between users, companies and the products that they produce. To further analyse these opportunities, two different product-people interactions were delved into, to understand how new forms of engaging people across the life cycle can achieve a more localised and responsive structures of manufacturing and product adoption. The results of these investigations helped to envision four contrasting scenarios of BaU, and generate conceptual business models and touchpoints to support these novel sys...
Are users innovators? The new communicational paradigm of our societies is built around the increasing role of the user as innovations developer and innovator in media content to be read, listen or viewed by others. Users have been increasingly addressed as innovators in media, not only because of the dissemination of the Internet and open source technologies but also because of the individualisation of media, namely mobile phones, video cameras and handheld mp3 and video players. Innovation has to be understood as a dialectical process between participants of unequal power and influence in the marketplace and in the on-going patterns of consumption and use (Silverstone, 2005). As Silverstone (2005) argues, SMS and file sharing have gained almost an aura of mythology in ICT innovation given that both were seen as signs of a radical shift in how innovation takes place, by rebalancing the way producers (technologist, designers, packagers, market analysts, investors) and the consumer interact. The mobile phone industry, taking notice of the SMS uses by youngsters incorporated such knowledge on new mobile phones and services offered (Silverstone 2005; Colombo 2006). Subsequently, the user started to be seen, by the industry, as ‘trend definer’ or ‘active tester of innovation’ (De Marez and De Moor, 2007). The innovation processes became less confined to the industrial environments because the quality of experience is measured through the launching of a high number of models into the market and by monitoring the user’s choice, in order to redefine which models to improve and which to drop. When users innovate they become, no longer ‘end-users’ (Slot, 2007) because they move into the heart of the very own value chain, that is, to the creativity arena. Creativity in a user centric approach, as the one that we are witnessing, depends on the ability of people to organise informal networks (be it companies or organisations that develop beta services/products) and then being able to attract users that will contribute to the definition of the next stage. Such attractiveness depends, in great measure, on the ability to open up the floor and work on the environment, hopping that such an offer will create the conditions for experimentation and creativity to develop among a given growing mediated community, usually web 2.0 sites, but also allowing monitoring the feedback.
Consumers and Technology in a Changing World
European Journal of Marketing, 2019
This is an editorial to a special issue on Consumers and Technology in a Changing World. Appearing in volume 53 issue 6, European Journal of Marketing (2019)