Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

Project H Design is a charitable organization that supports, inspires, and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design solutions.

They’ve worked on the Hippo Rollers and the Lifestraw.  The group just finished constructing their first Learning Landscapes math playground at the Kutamba School for AIDS Orphans in Southern Uganda.  The playground uses simple and available materials (tires, wood, concrete) to create a sort of game board for teaching math skills.

(Thanks Carrie Mae!)

WhiteAfrican on Mobile Development

1. The next generation of Africans are more mobile literate than you (or me), so when you develop something make sure you keep it open enough for them to evolve its use.
2. Develop for the common denominator - that is SMS services only. If you have the time, and see a need later, then go for the fancy Java apps.
3. Data services, like SMS are a good starting point, but don’t overlook the use and integration of voice. This is especially relevant in areas where local language dialects and literacy are an issue.
4. If you can, provide a basic service, and let the local users develop a plan for how to use it in their area.

MobileActive.org and Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts Program are hosting Mobile Tech 4 Social Change - New York, a BarCamp, on Feburary 21.  I’ll be attending.  Anyone want to join?

Rob Katz describes NextBillion.net as this:

..a movement in which profit is not seen in a pejorative way. Profit is actually seen as a way we can drive positive economic development…

via AfriGadget

Frog Design and IxDA hosted a Jan Chipchase talk tonight that I was lucky to attend (thanks yendo!). Chipchase is a design researcher for Nokia, and though he won’t claim the anthropologist title, he does spend lots of time for his job, and just in general, looking at how people structure their lives.  He spent quite a bit of the presentation talking about how to communicated collected design research to a (corporate) organization.  One of his suggestions for how to do the type of work you’d like within an organization was to allow the boundaries between your work and personal research blur.

Jan claimed these were the take away messages from the talk:

• question everything (including the need to do design research)
• participants are in control- His group is given time to spend with people, which comes with a responsibility to let participants shape the products.
• what motivates the researchers- He returned often to this.  If the international researchers and local facilitators have a clear understanding of what the objectives of the research are (and what things are not to be researched), it will allow them to be the most effective in their work.
• what are the boundaries- e.g. If doing data collection in a home, give data (pictures and video) to the participant on a USB drive. If the researchers know people will see the data collected, it will change how they will collect the data.

He also talked statistics.  With 6.6 billion people on earth and about half that amount of mobile subscriptions in the world, it is easy to see how design of mobile phones and applications for mobile phones have such an ability to impact the world.  He did mention that while it is difficult to design something cross platform for all the phones of the world, something designed using call back messages, SMS, or even voice, would have a huge potential market.

Additionally he spoke about projects (such as the Nokia Open Studios) and experiences from the field.  He showed a mobile phone application in Cairo telling the times for prayer and then asked us why such an application would be necessary in a society so completely governed by prayer times.  His answer was that the application was more about intention.  It could be a reminder to a person to do something they’ve decided to do, if it is kept private, or if it is displayed more publically it could show how a religious a person was.  Or even more, it could be a way to show that a person has a sophisticated mobile phone.

Jan also showed a picture of a legitimate electricity hookup and an illegal hookup to the electric system side-by-side on the same house.  The illegal hookup is culturally acceptable and can provide all of the needed power, so why pay an electricity bill as well?  The bill serves as an important form of identification.  Much in a same way, a mobile phone can be a connection to a bank account for people who would be traditionally too poor to interest banks.

The evening ended with Q and A.  Right before the applause, Jan returned to a question about his favorite or most inspirational moment during his travels. Talking about the transformative power of mobile connectivity Jan essentiatlly said: in a place where everyone is going after the newest, glitziest phone, it’s easy to foget how much a mobile connection can change a person’s life.

I met with DT faculty member Dave Carroll to go over my work for Pigeon.  We talked things technical, business, and academic.

Technical:

• Asterisk came up again
• He thought TXTML may be a good prototyping tool for SMS sign up, especially if it could be connected to my current Voxeo prototyping.  SMSs could be handled through some type of IMAP processing.

Business:

• If ad based, the ads could be contextual.  (As creepy as it sounds) messages could be decoded, and if someone mentions the Eifel tower an ad for France travel packages could play or be generated from a google ad words ad.
• Again the idea of some customers paying to support others came up.  I thought that perhaps at sign up users could sign up for a free account or a paying account which will support free acounts (similar to the Radiohead album sales and Good magazine’s newest subscription sign ups).
• Paying customers could perhaps get general or specific information about how their contribution is supporting users who can’t afford (e.g. “Your contribution this month has allowed 42 pigeons to be delivered”).

Academic

• New York Talk Exchange: the book - for statiscal data and essays on how international phone traffic is used by the extremes of the economic ladder.
• Mobile Persuasion - ed. B.J. Fogg
• Mobile Interaction Design - Matt Jones and Gary Marsden - good case studies in evaluating effectiveness of systems
• Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics

Dave thought that the best case scenario would be to have a working alpha by the end of this semester and a working beta by the end of next semester (”with 5000 users”).

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré announced in New York that worldwide mobile subscribers are likely to reach the 4 billion mark before the end of this year.

These are the experiments I have carried out to date:

• Creation of a system map of Pigeon and a beeping system
• Implementation of sign up
• Implementation of adding contacts
• Implementation of proper public messaging
• User testing (of above implementation, of instruction sets or how to talk about the concept)

Questions carrying me forward:

• What other alternative methods of sing up should be created?
• What other existing systems of communication can Pigeon be linked with (i.e. Google Chat status message, Facebook)?
• What type of short instruction can be given to create the context for the system (i.e. Pigeon gives you two minutes to tell your world what you’re up to)?
• Should you be able to order your contacts for playback?
• Should optional or mandatory profile information be collected to assist in finding contacts?
• How can the system and promotional material emphasize the voice aspect of Pigeon?
• How can Pigeon be useful in developed contexts?
• Could usage in developed contexts financially support usage in developing regions?
• How can this be a sustainable business?
• How can Pigeon be simply and quickly explained to non-users and users new to the system?

The default device in Africa is the mobile phone.

The White African has post about his presentation at Picnic called “If It Works in Africa, It Will Work Anywhere.”  He talks specifically about a variety of mobile innovators and more generally about why this mobile innovation matters on a global scale.

Asterisk “the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit.”

Redial: Inteactive Telephony is a NYU ITP class that teaches Asterisk with an online syllabus.

(Thanks Mike!)