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.

I spent a week in February in Sunningdale near London for a training course. My mates were 23 people from all over the world and from various professions. We were asked to work in teams for many games that may be seen as children’s – like moving blocks, building a water fountain out of logs and ropes, or a bridge out of lego blocks and pieces of thin wood. Our MBTI and Belbin types were on our name tags (I am ENTJ, Planter, Monitor-evaluator, Resource Investigator, and Shaper – if you can make out what that means: I can only say that this seems to contradict my image of a meek Asian woman in the eyes of strangers). It is easy to fear the abuse of psychology, but I really enjoyed having the time to keenly observe how I behave, and put myself into a perspective in comparison with others.



I don’t think I could become a better person after this, but am definitely more self-aware and ready to experiment to become a more adaptable person for others when the next opportunity arises.

I am grateful for the opportunity to attend LIFT conference this year (thanks to organizers).
What left me thinking after the conference was the access to information, both in terms of breadth and speed. Within minutes, video recordings of talks became available online. The army of healthily pulsating Apple logos seen from the speaker’s stage was daunting, tappitytaptaptap, opinions and snippets of the talks being available and marked online as soon as they came to existence, in people’s ears and eyes. You are there, but at the same time you can potentially be anywhere.



LIFT was a big contrast to the academic conferences I am more used to, such as CHI, DIS, DUX, Ubicomp, and Mobile HCI. What you see in these conferences as audience is guaranteed to be old, usually at least 1 year. You as a shy speaker have little to worry about the presentation because your paper is your real glory. Having been published in these conferences can be considered that you earned a little stamp of quality for your work, at least in the eyes of your professors at your graduate school. Your paper might end up being read by less than a handful of people, but that’s ok – because you registered your name in the ACM digital library. Who knows, perhaps in 10 years there will be some other graduate students who will cite your publication? OK, I am overly negative now. Being a Korean and because of my personal upbringing, I am and will be perpetually chased by the favoritism to meritocracy – subsequently I still respect the academic institutions and their authorities.

But the world has changed. It’s about the influence. Information not found through google may have less value to humanity in general; outdated information goes through devaluation not necessarily because of the content but because of streams of other information we have to digest everyday.

Information is power. In many countries in Asia – knowledge and information has been used as a weapon to keep the general public out of power. The infrastructure will soon be there for any willing individuals to have access to the gigantic information pool created in the online universe. But there, we are defining a new type of meritocracy: Ability to search, ability to filter, ability to ignore, and ability to build and control online identity and reputation.

It is uplifting to hear the story of an undercover video clip made online by Humane Society, prompting USDA investigation which lead to recalling of millions of kilograms of beef; it is scary to watch the interview of a Korean celebrity against all the malignant gossips created around him, amplified and spread by the Internet. We are marching towards creating human societies in the subjective online universe – comprised of smaller bubbles of entities with their existence endowed by the attention and interests they manage to evoke; others wither into ether, or in memory and emotion of their creators.

I have no showmanship when it comes to speak in front of hundreds of pulsating Apple logos or unfamiliar people. I felt standing on a street on stage in front of LIFT audience and camera crews, a street that I cannot perceive how it is shaped, where it was, or how crowded it will be. I felt I was leaving a piece of me in a space that is not governed by the natural law of time. There was no protection of the wall that academic conferences provided, making the information not so accessible. Would I be able to get used to being on such spaces? It’s a question mark. After all – so long as I don’t google myself, those spaces minimizes their existence for me to a certain extent.

There is always a battle in preparing my talk to cut the material short to fit 20-min stage time I am usually given. 20 minutes is still way too short for me as I usually work with 1 hour or longer slots of time at my work place. But I do understand very well my value as a speaker is up to my ability to condense whatever material I got into the given time slot. After all, many professions depend on how well we tell the story, not on how well you do your job in your own world. My LIFT talk was mainly about the process of setting up a design competition in communities we went to for quick yet much focused ethnographic research, as a complementary method to understand the communities we knew almost nothing about. I didn’t go about its value and validity much, which probably disappointed some people but probably would have bored lots of people who do not work in the related professions if I did.





A few remarkable things for me about LIFT: I had the honor of being in the same session with the reverend Genevieve and Paul – which will be very memorable for a long time to come. I met a few brilliant minds that I never knew before, through the smartly arranged social breaks. I enjoyed experiencing the little Swiss moments, like the cheese fondue dinner, slices of cheese at lunch time, crisp air and Geneva’s efficiency. If you are around and available – come join next year! Or you can always watch videos online, without the extras.

I rarely have a chance to travel with Korean Air except when I visit my family in Korea. However – whenever I travel with them, I can’t help smiling at their one unique service:
Stickers for the passenger sleeping or away from the seat during the inflight service.

If you had experienced waking up in the middle of the flight hungry, or even worse - woken up by a persistent flight attendant who wants to fulfill his/her duty by distributing the goods to you, you will appreciate this little attention to detail. There were two different kinds of stickers I have seen in Korean Air flights.

This simple sticker was used during the domestic flight from Busan to Seoul, of which the flight time is just 45 minutes. It was put on by the flight attendant during the complimentary drink service.





This set of stickers were in the seat on the 2-hour flight from Seoul to Tokyo, so that the passenger can choose appropriate ones to put on the seat before going to sleep or any type of ‘rest’ mode. A suitable variation of the same service intent when there were more types of services offered.



The definition of a good service may be inherently subjective. We probably all have our own opinions on it, as we surely know the feeling of being served properly. Restaurants are probably a good place to discover the meaning of a good service mindset that suits you. Personally, I started to distinguish services in general in two criteria:

1. Ones that are motivated by the server wanting to be recognized
e.g., In a very posh Indian hotel restaurant, the waiters came to our table every other minute to ask “Is everything alright?” interrupting our conversation every time.
e.g., In a busy restaurant in Tokyo, the waiter cleared the plates away from the table immediately when I was eyeing on my last bit of the remaining sauce.

2. Ones that are motivated by the server’s empathy to the served
e.g., In a restaurant in California, the waitress brought a new fork as soon as she noticed me dropping mine on the floor.
e.g., In a restaurant in Seoul, the waitresses roams around the restaurant and refills the kimchi plate constantly till your meal is almost over – which allows adjusting the amount of kimchi served to each customer, without the customers always having to ask for more portions.
e.g., On a rainy day in Osaka, a café owner offered me an umbrella as I was paying the bill. She must have noticed that I didn’t bring one despite the weather, and discreetly offered it to me at the right time.

I draw a parallel between the real world services and the interaction design solutions in computer software or mobile phone service. Both take a great deal of understanding of the individual clienteles’ preferences and recognizing the intentions of the situations that are not explicitly communicated. And it is becoming more and more complex to do this as many design solutions are done to serve a large group of individuals with extremely diverse cultural backgrounds. Given the complexity I find my two simple criteria for distinguishing the restaurant services helpful in deciding features in service design that should be done invisibly – or automatically, from the ones that you should prompt for the user’s decision based on contextual observations. Something that our old friendly office clip understood well – but executed rather poorly.

Most my references come from my restaurant experiences, but increasingly from inflight services. So far, my worst bit of inflight service experiences was the BA flight attendant refusing to help me with loading my luggage because “she was not insured to the injury incurred by helping me”. Services are a tight interaction between the server and the served. Sometimes external constraints like BA’s policy on its employees prevent the server from providing a good service. It was nice of her to explain the reason for not helping me at least - as I could use some sympathy towards her rather than feeling angry. A nice gentleman helped me with the luggage anyway.

prep for early start
Originally uploaded by jabberer

Leaving for a session at 3.30am tomorrow. Praying for the good weather- less rain.

pause
Originally uploaded by jabberer

Early sunday morning, luckily not raining and streets are drained. Garbage bins placed by the government. Dharavi, Mumbai, India.

variables in the fieldwork
Originally uploaded by jabberer

Morning news showed mumbai’s train lines stopped working because of heavy rainfall overnight. We went to check the interviewee schedule for tomorrow, and as expected- her home was flooded so no one could stay in. We postponed our plan with her till her home’d be recovered.

On another note- Having paid my due being sick with food by spending good part of a night throwing up, i quietly moaned when i was offered food during another home interview, which can never be refused. But it turned out to be the best food i had in my entire stay here so far.

The continuing cycle of walking in flooded sewage water and being cleaned up by dettol gently reminds me of the reincarnation of life.

in mumbai
Originally uploaded by jabberer

An unforgettable experience in mumbai in its monsoon season. Staying at the edge of dharavi, at a guest house. My room for two weeks.

tech check
Originally uploaded by jabberer.

I saw the presentations of zaha hadid in the back room, and met yves behar [fuse project], who demonstrated the working one-laptop-per-child. Fascinating to see what people can do……