Drivers in India – at least for commercial vehicles – are rarely alone in the car. There is always a companion or more in some form near the driving seat.
An airport bus driving seat at Delhi airport with Saibaba’s face on the window.
This rural neighborhood, Horsu, in Tamil Nadu near Bangalore has seen a growing number of green houses for flowers. As the city provides relatively constant consumption of flowers, they make a relatively low-risk yet high-margin business.
The wise farmer we talked to said: “It will be the mobile entertainment service that farmers will adopt first. Why do you think flower farming makes a good business?”
I was asked for my home address today – I could only say “I don’t have one at the moment, except my temporary address.” Have you realized the limited access to services you will experience when one of these is taken away, lost, or invalid: Home address, mobile phone number, governmental identification, credit/bank card?
The world is often not designed for, or accommodating to those who do not have a regular place to live. Or opted out of using the means that are typically used to prove where you live. When I wanted to register to eBay.co.uk while I lived in UK, it offered two options to confirm my existence so that I can become a member: A landline phone number or a credit card. I never had a landline phone number myself since 1998, and one and only credit card from Japanese bank was of course not accepted since they could not verify the address for the card, which was in Japanese.
Recently I stayed in South Korea for a while. Even though I am a citizen, I found myself constantly relying on other people’s identity: mobile phone, residential address, and credit card. With Korean Internet services, it becomes more evident – I felt like an underground citizen not having a mobile phone of my own. So the role of residential or ‘permanent’ addresses is becoming a shared one with the mobile number. Ironically, or naturally – our digital being is only acknowledged when it is verifiably linked to our physical being.
Socially and systematically our digital birth is not acknowledged. It only becomes valid when our physical and proven existence is linked to it. Will this change? Will we – digitally or physically – be freed from our permanent residence when so many of us are no longer in a position to claim a permanent residence?
Living out of suitcases quite often, my attention is always attracted by how people manage to live in the minimal space and things. Here are some taken in Osaka, Tokyo. I indulge in the clear visibility of what is essential for the living. The digital life of this home owner? – I am left to wonder.
I took on a new job to lead a research team since the beginning of this year. Along with it I moved to a new homebase, a city often referred to as ‘silicon valley of India’, or formerly as ‘garden city of India’. Compared to any other places I had taken on as my home city, moving to Bangalore seems to trigger varied reactions from people – with stronger emotional undertone. To me, to live in a place is to understand, experiencing the culture rather than being an observer.
For those of you who want to share my experience in Bangalore, I have several open positions in my team: exploratory user researcher, HCI researcher, and a couple of technical positions for developing prototypes, visualization and computational models.
The exploratory user researcher position requires you to speak the local language, as we do a lot of hands-on fieldwork within India. I am also looking for talented designers for internship or short-term contract positions. If you think you are a good match for this young & growing research team and are up for the opportunity to live in Bangalore, drop me a note with your CV, along with your motivation.
If you are interested in technical positions, job ads are found here and you can apply directly through the site. Use the following job number to search for them: SWA0000000F (super prototype developer) / ARC0000001Y (data modeling & visualization) / DES00000020 (HCI researcher). Kindly be pre-warned that using this site may require a lot of patience from you, unfortunately.
Posters and drawings on the walls of primary health centers in India. If you want to get an idea of the seriousness of the matter to educate and treat the local population, you can have a look at the comparison of top 10 causes of death between the developed and developing countries.
Can you design a poster so convincing that the beholder would change the attitude, or get motivated for proper treament or prevention? I am no graphic designer, but this presents a good challenge for those of you who are.
on a different note: my new team, Nokia Research Center India worked on a mobile service pilot called Health Radar, a reporting system for malaria outbreaks in 2009. this is no graphic design work, but it dealt with how we can change the existing practices of information dissemination and assimilation. changing the existing and forming new habits are the most challenging part of making the new practice work, which is to happen to various people involved throughout the whole process. in the next decade or so we hope to see the top 10 causes of death list in the developing countries will see a dramatic change.
A good maternity care is the foundation of a healthy society. While traditional wisdom still prevails in communities with little influence of modern technology and services, it does not always offer the best possible solutions available.
One of the challenges that primary health centers (PHC) in rural India are facing is to make people be aware and trust the medical services that they provide. Offering a substantial amount of cash & a maternity package (pictured below, containing all the basic goods needed for a new born baby) to give birth in the PHC is an exemplary effort to attract such population to the advanced medical service.
I have experienced maternity indirectly through people around me. But not much when it comes to the real realm of parental responsibilities. In January, I had a chance to visit government-run health centers in Udupi district in South West India. As an unexpected byproduct of the visit, I learned a great deal about maternity healthcare.
The printed material for the maternity care fascinated me (to be honest, I don’t know what material is available in other countries). This government issued maternity education and record keeping material design is very visual so that literacy level does not matter much in using it. In any case, all the materials come available in the local language of the region.
The record for vaccination needs to be kept by the family for at least 5 years, depite it being just a mere piece of paper. It acts both as a record keeping tool as well as reminder for the future visits or activities.
Field workers, called asha (accredited social health activist) are vital for rural healthcare in India. While the majority of population lacks an official identity, these field workers walk the ground on foot, visiting house to house for families that they are responsible for and get all the needed information manually to update the records back in the office. They are also the mobile networks to disseminate information, mediate communications, and educate residents on health. Tey are the mobile healthcare enablers, where both families’ and doctors’ mobility is compromised due to the lack of vehicles, roads, or time. Above all, they are the human and humane keys to open the suspecting hearts to the potentials of modernized, unfamiliar services.
If you look at the whole of healthcare as a service, you will see a lot of parts that can be improved dramatically by implementing technology solutions replacing the existing roles of people’s manual work. More often than not, service designers should really try to foresee whether the partial replacements would become a sustainable part of the whole organic process.
A bigger part of the total cost of implementation in getting technology solutions into existing processes is often about changing the human practices after all, ranging from re-training staffs and users, to political and social policies. How will roles of asha’s change in the coming years? What would be the crux of their role that would remain stronger than before? Where should the first investment of changes be?
I deeply thank doctors at the primary health centers, who opened the doors for us and took their valuable time. And the Manipal University staffs who kindly guided us.
what do you see in this product?
it is a tobacco package you can see all around India, usually sold in street stalls specializing in all things around smoking and chewing (and subsequently spitting) pleasures of men. i thought all cigarettes were branded with a scorpion logo and hence monopoly might be in place for cigarettes in India.
as you can see on other products – the scorpion logo is not a branding of any particular company, but it is a symbol used for health warning. having been born and living in scorpion-free countries, the logo does not communicate any danger – except the faint memory from reading fairy tales and myths.
In case you haven’t noticed – there is a conference on design research in Seoul from tomorrow, October 20th, 2009. The online registration is already closed, but if you happen to be in Seoul – the onsite registration is still possible.
I will be running a full-day tutorial on the exploratory design research, with a special focus on how to involve people in the process. I will approach it like a participatory workshop: I plan to use my past projects as a way to let participants think about designing the design research methods.
A full-day tutorial means 5-6 hours on Sunday, so it’s only for the really dedicated (and those who are free from the real-world chores on weekend).
But it will be good to see you there: this is a very rare chance for me to look back at and share the various projects over the last decade in depth with you. Your opinions and feedback will be of great inspiration to me.
Conference website: http://www.iasdr2009.org/
I believe it is and will be one of most growing industries – body maintenance and enhancement. There must be a lot of local practices worth revisiting and possibly spreading. Some intimate snapshots from Chinese ear cleaning (making sure your ears are in good working order and cleaned) and suction cup treatment (boost your circulation) sessions, thanks to the co-adventurers who were not camera-shy.
the suction cups left my back in red polka dot pattern for a couple of weeks afterwards.