Helping people handle mobiles better

Nokia's head of design direction Adam Greenfield sports tattoos on his arms, eschews business cards and isn't sure he is making any money for his company.

While many industry executives were sweet-talking clients at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mr Greenfield was conducting a walking tour of downtown Wellington, pointing out how the digital cityscape was affecting urbanites, and preparing for a speech at the hipper Webstock conference.

Mr Greenfield, who works from Nokia's corporate headquarters in Helsinki, "doesn't do" Barcelona.

His interest is how technology is used in "everyday life by ordinary people". That has taken him and his team to villages in India, slums in Egypt, the Sois of Bangkok and the favelas of Brazil.

Nokia is the world's largest mobile phone maker and "an enlightened organisation makes all sorts of investments with an unclear return", Mr Greenfield says. "If you don't have people like me in the equation, what you have is engineers producing devices and services for other engineers – people who are highly conversant with technology designing products for people who look just like them."

One of his main conclusions: everyday life is a source of tremendous pressure for the great majority of people. "We ought not to be adding to that by producing products and services that are the equivalent of a car alarm or a screaming child."

2degrees chief executive Eric Hertz has forecast there will be 20 million devices connected to mobile networks in New Zealand within 10 years, when networked devices will far outstrip the population.

Mr Greenfield says that even if people eschew gadgets and try to opt out of the "ubiquitous computing" revolution, they can't help being affected by the changes that will take place around them.

"It is not a matter of the number of devices we carry. We are immersed in a world of networked resources and network information that increasingly conditions the choices that are available to us in everyday life.

"Each one of us, whether we are aware of it or not, is moving through a condition of `network weather' that surrounds us."

As an example, he points to a United States-based social location service called Foursquare. "Its target audience is 20-somethings who probably go out a couple of times a week, and what you do with Foursquare is you `check in' to a place – you go to a bar and use your mobile device to announce to your social circle where you are.

"You get `points' for that – it imposes a kind of game-like logic on everyday life – and if you go to that bar often enough you become the `mayor' of that bar and get a little crown next to your name."

Savvier business owners in New York and London have figured out that means loyalty, and offer the "mayor" of their bars a discount or a free drink, which he says is changing the way people socialise.

"It means that when you go out to a bar, you spend the first five minutes struggling with your phone to check-in because you don't want to miss out on that. It means all of a sudden, maybe one bar has a line out the door and the others are empty, because one of them has figured out how to use Foursquare and speak to that audience through that interface.

"If you don't have visibility into that layer, you would be walking down the street and wondering why that bar was so busy – not knowing what made it different."

The challenge facing humanity is to stay masters of technology, rather than pawns in a networked world. "Technology companies have to get much better at spending time with people who use the products they make. We need to understand what motivates people, and the pressures they live under."

Convenience is the main driver in people's lives, he says. Often – like Tiger Woods, whose affairs were exposed by text message records – they only consider the privacy implications of some technologies when it is too late.

But Mr Greenfield sees plenty of opportunities, too, in a more networked world. Instead of sitting in garages unused for most of the day, cars could be shared and pooled, "if they were a subscribable, network resource".

The challenge of affording and powering billions of computer chips could constrain the pace of change.

"There are reasonable estimates that 10 per cent of the global annual planetary energy budget is already devoted to computation. Clearly if you are proposing an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of networked devices that are going to be deployed in the world, you are either talking about doing something to address that issue or you are talking about a constraint."

But Mr Greenfield envisages low-power active radios being embedded in "just about everything". The cost of connecting devices to networks is now so low, that "any future return whatsoever" justifies the expense.

- © Fairfax NZ News