its always hard to leave. that’s perhaps a reason why i never want to have a farewell party. time to change the home city in dopplr - something appropriate to be done in the airport.

at an indian wedding, one of many activities that kept the bride busy was answering mobile phone calls from those who could not attend the wedding. several mobile phones were passed onto her ears from others as well as her own since some remote callers were considerate enough to call other relatives attending the ceremony that they knew, sparing the bride from dealing with constantly ringing phones and carrying the phone without any pockets on the traditional wedding costume.



from mumbai, india, 2007.

i came across several people who grew one or two nails very long for a specific purpose - and mostly they were men. its a good contrast to those who grow long fingernails, or extend their fingernails in a way that they are banned for utilitarian purposes.

he was a tailor living in dharavi/mumbai/india and he uses his long finger nail to make the crease on clothes.



david who works at a mobile phone repair shop in accra/ghana had a long finger nail to handle small mobile phone parts and circuits.



a student studying computer science in accra, he likes to have long finger nails because he likes the way he looks. there should be more than one so that he can use them to keep his finger nails clean on both hands.



i usually keep my nails long enough to protect my fingertips. i had two broken nails this week packing boxes, and its unbelievably bothersome. nails are a usefully embedded tool enhancing the performance of the most dexterous part of my body except: using touch screen devices. i had the strange feeling of rejection - almost temporary resentment - when i couldn’t type on iphone as it didnt acknowledge my touch as a touch.

i read a short korean newspaper article today about sexual harassment through video calls. illustration below & the original article from kyunghyang.com.



according to the article, the reported callers disabled the caller identification so the receiver could not judge who the call was from before deciding to take the video call. one of the victims captured the video call with a camera and reported to the police. the victims said that the received video calls showed either masturbating scenes or exposed genitals. another sexual harassment case was also reported on a man who repeatedly made video calls of sexual nature to his (ex)girlfriend. the article urges a solution to prevent harassment attempts through video calls as their impact on the victims can be more substantial than text based messages or voice calls. particularly, in these cases, police failed to identify the callers through the mobile phone operators because of the caller id protection, which did not seem to have been designed for cases like this. if you can read korean, the original article is found here.

i pick on this as it is a good example of abusing a useful tool: can there be a smart design solution that could prevent or reduces the impact of the abuse without compromising the regular, normal usage (including the phone, calls, and the caller id function itself)? or a solution that would discourage people from attempting so to begin with, like advertising the existence of the surveillance cameras? the intrusion potential does become higher as the bandwidth of information transmitted through each communication session increases as with the potential benefits. furthermore as mobile communication channels diversify, it is important that people can be still in full control: how do i want to be connected and disconnected? this question has so many facets that relevant answers may (have to) come from - device user interface design, communication infrastructural design, legal enforcement, transformation of social norms, personal lifestyles and preferences, competence in using the device. people have incredible ability to adapt to or reject changes and the trade-offs between the cost and the effect will be always assessed before it is fully integrated as a behavioral change.

perhaps my past project called ‘defined delivery‘ may be a slightly related example of a design work on the topic of increasing mobile communication modality and therefore the social sensibility. the zest of the concept was that text messages can be delivered to the recipient in the desirable / desired context as the sender intends to, as this is our natural communication behavior. for voice calls, it is not rare that we ask upfront to the recipient whether it is good time for a call, implying that the caller does not want to interrupt the recipient and/or the call needs to take place in certain contexts - be it the recipient’s physical state or attention level, or the noises from the environment. translating the same principle into text messaging context, we designed and built a new messaging prototype application on Nokia 7650s that enabled the sender to define the context in which the message should be delivered (in fact notified) to the recipient. the prototypes were tested with a group of high school students and the result of this work was presented at CHI 2005, and the presentation can be available upon request to jung at younghee dot com. the official conference paper can be downloaded here (but beware of the boring language if you are not familiar with CHI paper format).

without going further on speculating the specific design solutions to relieve the mishaps of the intrusion potentials of the video calls, i would like to jump onto a simple example on how japanese people came up with solutions against sexual harassments in crowded commuter trains. have you have been to one of those super crowded trains which designated personnel to push people into, wearing white gloves? all illustrations are from other websites - click on the image to go to the webpage where it is originally posted from.


it is difficult to identify the owner of the hands in an extremely crowded, confined space. and even if you do, it is not easy to deal with the situation when most passengers are under time pressure without being able to move freely. one solution is to designate women-only metro cars during peak hours.


another is to raise the public awareness of the fact that being ‘chikan’ is a criminal act through posters and signs. photo below is from jan’s weblog.


there are a number of personal mobile accessories designed to prevent ‘chikan’, like a pen-sized stun gun or an alarm buzzer.


the legal system has also developed to promote victims to report cases. but it seems that the side effect is also substantial as once accused, it is difficult for men to get away with it. read these humorous tips for men below about avoiding false accusations of being chikan, with the original article in japanese found here.

[ excerpt from mari’s diary ]
No.1 Don’t stand behind women. especially you should skip beautiful woman.
No.2 If she misunderstands and glares at you, never look away. You should glare at her back. There was a precedent case that the testimony “he looked away, so I was convinced he was the molester” was accepted in the court.
No.3 Unfortunately when you are misunderstood as a molester, you should never go to staff room in the train station with her, even though she insists. The law of criminal procedure permits the immediate arrest by a private individual. If you follow her, it means you are arrested by her and she can turn you in the police. To take the best chance of clearing yourself, you should leave the place after giving your contact address to her.
My friends say they try to read a book using both hands, or one hand in the bag and the other holding on a strap.

i am in the middle of the mess for moving to london end of the month, but felt obliged to log this article here with a little bit of recollection of the past year’s work.

last year, we hosted a journalist, sara corbett in our fieldwork in accra, ghana. her experience with us introduced the backbone of her article featured in new york times magazine, told through our darling media embassador & my long-time colleague/ team mate/ tokyo office neighbor/ personal financial advisor, jan.

perhaps overly self-conscious at the fact that i work for a mobile phone manufacturer, i rarely use the word ‘cell phone’: especially when i have to refer to something that will be available in the future that will change using our natural ability in new yet relevant ways. be it a cell phone or not, it’s not really relevant - its about what kind of personal and social technology and services will be feasible and possible and easy to adopt.

are you fancying about becoming design researcher yourself? while i eagerly wait for a more formal opportunity to talk about our research in the future, here’s a quick & random recollection of my personal experience in our last year’s project, future urban, in four cities of chongqing (china), mumbai (india), rio (brazil) and accra (ghana).

chongqing was our pilot city for the project, so we spent more time in ad-hoc interviews, which means going out with a local translator to a part of the city and informally interacting with locals. chongqing is a very fast changing, industrial city. it is very common to see the site of demolition right next to the brand new buildings and commercial centers.



sometimes my local guide was reluctant to go to certain areas that i boldly, or blindly wanted to go as he was concerned about my safety. some houses we were eventually invited to were expected to be demolished in a few months - we could actually feel the vulnerable state of the house.



this is a kitchen in a temporary apartment for the demolition manager of a building. he and his wife lived in one apartment in a building that he was in charge of demolishing. being a nomad myself, i often think about minimizing my physical possessions by digitizing what could be in plastic or on paper. having their home in the country side, and moving from one building to another based on the job, they optimized their furniture by employing a much lighter alternative: plastic bags. it took curiosity and patience for us to encounter this couple, as the whole building site looked totally deserted and the demolition was half way through.



the same couple’s kitchen/dining table - the compact set of home electronics would probably fit into a suitcase. how minimal and mobile can our life be?

thanks to the project schedule, we arrived in mumbai in the middle of the monsoon season. it had taken all of us several visits to the medical clinic in tokyo for the due vaccination shots and emergency medicines.



can you imagine saying that dettol is your best friend? for those two weeks, i did feel very grateful at the invention of the antiseptic medicine. the regular flooding of the sewage water on the streets of dharavi however became one of the most memorable experiences in my entire trip. but it was heart-breaking to see the house getting flooded that belonged to one of potential research participants.



we stayed in a guesthouse right at the border of the dharavi community. while it was a small guesthouse, the prolific human service in india still made room service as an option. being able to enjoy the local breakfast is a blessing in the fieldwork. i don’t really have any staple food - not even coffee - so i thoroughly enjoy sampling all kinds of new food in the city or the community i visit.



but of course liking the local food may have its high price. luckily i only spent one night of talking to the big whilte telephone during my stay, with company of earth worms and cockroaches casually making their ways around the bathroom floor.



one of my interviews was scheduled at 3:30am in the family’s home as that was when the interviewee started his day. finding the family’s house in the dark through the maze of small streets would not have been possible without our mobile phones. one of my two local translators fell asleep on the interviewee’s bed at the abnormal working hour while the interview was ongoing, and i panicked at the lack of her professionalism. but quickly realized that for the host family, she was a guest to be taken care of.



i had my best indian food at our research participants’ homes. a pleasurable dilemma when you know that you won’t be able to go to toilet for at least half a day while you are on the job.

in favela jacarezinho in rio, we had a chance to discuss about our way of working most seriously & thoroughly.



while the camera accessibility was an issue, we were lucky enough to have MC Serginho as our community guide, thanks to our local team. Mr. Serginho was truly proud of and in love with his community.



this is a picture of what’s called ‘gato’ in portugese. basically it is illegally drawn electricity cables. one of the challenges we often faced in our interviews was talking about illegal behaviors that are acknowledged and done widely or just by a few. it takes a great deal of trust for someone to be able to talk about it. sometimes i do wonder if how our questions would have worked in super-digital generations where the weight and the flow of information and hence the implications of the information disclosure is very different. i had my utmost interviewing skill tested in an interview with a professional sex worker lady in a public place in copacabana. a good reminder of the fact that the effect of who you are cannot be ignored in the fieldwork, as with many other things in our lives: i had the benefit of being a woman myself in the interview. likewise i didnt have a chance to interview any male participant myself in india.

after gone through electricity cuts, polluted air, flooding, security precautions, buduburam and accra in ghana were a comfortable breeze for the fieldwork. english being one of the spoken languages helped a lot as well, even though the common usage of multiple tribal languages complicated the research team planning.



i had a night of home-stay in buduburam camp. i stayed in an elegantly decorated lady’s room with the luxury of a toilet in the room. with water supply completely manual, i had gone through the experience of planning my water consumption so that i wouldn’t exhaust all the water supply just to flush the toilet.



many effective sales units defy the industrial packages in the community. grains are probably a natural one. more rare selling units included soaps and detergents, and empty bottles of different sizes for lamp oils.





a good sign of beginning to learn about the new culture is to grasp, or to wonder about the relative value of goods and services. and naturally this often constitutes a good part of our interview questions.

back to packing & pondering upon simplifying life & mobility prior to moving to another continent now. more later, hopefully.

at a casual restaurant in accra, customers order first which items they want on their plates. the prepared plates get these white caps till they are finally handed to the paid customers.



at a korean restaurant in shanghai, all tables are set with plates and cutlery covered till customers are seated on the table.



at a restaurant in tokyo (tokatsu tonki in meguro), toothpicks are covered with a clear glass.



at a street cafe in accra, bottled drinks are served with half-open bottle caps.



some of these are for practical reasons, some more symbolic to show their service mentality. i do get my tiny moments of happiness when i can sense that someone has thought through how the customer would feel about their service and the food.

on a slight tangent, i cant help thinking about various possible seals on digital information, for instance - ‘freshness - from within 1 day’, ‘authenticity’, or ‘exclusivity’. in the late 90’s of the internet age, reputation and social recommendation systems were a big topic (or at least around T.J.Watson research center where I worked as a student). internet is a social place & inherently everything’s centered/centering around people behind, but i believe we are reaching an era in which some parts of the society will demand digital information identity as much as humans’ that does not get subjected to the democracy of people’s behaviors and subjective opinions.

upon entering a park in shanghai, there was a signboard with a compact set of information for park visitors. on the top, there’s a picture and a phone number of the person to contact should anything happen in the park. below, highest/lowest temperature of the day & other relevant phone numbers are listed. its a nice gesture but at the same time it is difficult to imagine how this set of information can be useful for park visitors in practice. it would take a lot of forward-thinking for anyone to predict the usefulness of these numbers & save them for future use upon seeing this information.

many location-based mobile services are subjected to play around the similar threshold of adoption, from service discovery to engagement to actual usage. often it is also about how to transform the linearity to an encompassing, opportunistic space: the physical sign board which broadcasts information at a set node vs. an information broadcast available in a larger area such as a park.



chinese public parks are very vibrant, always full of engaging & engaged activities - encompassing all age groups, be it tai-chi practice, playing chinese chess, singing practice, kite flying, dance performance, or caligraphy with water.













on a sunday afternoon in shanghai in march 2008.