Nokia's Design Research for Everyone

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So what happens when you get there?

As soon as we arrive, the rules change. Maybe there's no electricity, or the guy who really absolutely said he wanted to be a part of the study won't do it. There are so many different variables. If we just go by the book when we're there, we would miss all these different opportunities for stuff that presents itself. We really try to see how people fit together and adapt.

How do you approach your research?

We have maybe a dozen techniques for engaging with people from the local culture. We do street surveys which typically involve 100-plus people. Typically, I buy a bicycle and cycle around the city with a translator. If we see something interesting, we get off and we engage. It's a breadth and depth approach to understanding the culture. Last year, I think I bought 10 bicycles. At the end of the study we give them away to people.

What did you learn about how humans share things?

When we're there, the fact is there are 101 things we would have never considered when we were planning. Some stuff is loosely related to what we're interested in, and some is just a total tangent, but we make sure we document it all.

When we went to Uganda and Indonesia to deliver one report, we actually came back with five or six reports. We did one big one, but we delivered all these other very visual reports that we knew would interest different people in the company. I posted a few of them online.

It was things like: If you don't have access to power, how do you keep electrical objects in your home charged? They had incredibly simple yet sophisticated ways of doing this.

It's innovation through necessity. For example, if there's one person in the village that has a mobile phone, it's possible to send money to any person in the village. It works like this: I'm in Kampala, an urban location. You're my cousin, and you're in a village somewhere in a rural location. This is really an example of street innovation. You don't have a mobile phone, but there's a phone in the village. I buy a prepaid phone card in Kampala, and instead of using it to top up my own phone, I call the local village kiosk operator and I read out the number, and they use that number to top up their phone. Or I could text message it. Some of the carriers have caught on to this and worked out a way of systematically sending air time.

So then the kiosk operator pays the cousin the cost of the minutes?

There's this thing called "sente." It's the word for money in Uganda, and it's got a second meaning, which is to send money as air time. It works in the same way, except the kiosk operator then takes a commission of 10% to 20%—basically extending banking services to people who have no banking infrastructure.

If they wanted to do this before the mobile phone, they would have to spend a day traveling to the nearest village. They would have to wait at a bank for many hours. And even then, the bank probably wouldn't be able to do the money transfer because they wouldn't have a bank account because they're not rich enough.

Basically, this turns anyone who has a mobile phone into an ATM machine on an abstract level.

What does this mean to Nokia?

There are actually things that come out of this that help us frame other things directly related to our business. But the other side of it is simply using it to inspire us to think more broadly.

One example: Within six months of completing that study in Uganda, one of our business units had filed a patent not directly relating to something like "sente," but using the material from the entire study as an inspiration to [investigate] how people manage the expenses related to their calls. It was being offered as a financial service by our business unit.