Full Circle Associates

Trolling my blog roll I came upon a link from Ross Mayfield to a story from May 9 in the Portland Oregonian. It resonated with a pattern I see in my work inside but even moreso outside of the US. People consistently use tools in ways designers -- with their particular experience and cultural contstructs -- never imagined. Of course, I think it is brilliant how people adapt tools to their needs. (I also worry about the cultural implications of how tools affect the community of users. That's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.)

What amazes me is that the results of the study seemed to be a surprise to the writer, but a given for the anthropologist. We are living in a global society, but in the US, we still persist in a US set of glasses. Ross referred to this as ethnographic disruptions. If we look at it from a global perspective, it is not disruption. It is common sense! It is only the blinkered who are surprised.

Intel study upsets ideas of how products are used:

"One of the things this project helped me see very clearly was the ways in which we were assuming the cross-cultural nature of the home, that there was a physical thing that was the home that would be the same everywhere. The assumptions around that got built into a lot of things that we and the technology industry more broadly were doing...

In the West, one of the critical metaphors we use to divide up our time and our space is the idea of the negotiation between work and leisure. ... But what if there's a third set of activities that are really important? What if there are things around play, or religion or health and wellness that don't neatly fit into the work or leisure category?

One of the things that became clear in Asia, and is becoming true in the West, but we're not really good at seeing it, is that people are using these technologies for those third activities. In Asia, it's visible in the way people use mobile devices to support religious activities. The nicest example is people using their mobile phones to find Mecca. LGE, a Korean handset company, has produced a Mecca-finding handset with GPS technology in it...

...In the U.S., we imagine that mobile phones are linked to individuals, and it's a mode of individual communication. In fact, the model of privatized ownership is one of our foundational social notions, even within the family. We have one of everything -- our own cars our own TV, PC . . . But people believe in different ways of ownership . . .There's a bunch of working classes and ethnic groups that own phones in common. The model is not individual-to-individual communications, but node to node, or social network to social network, and that model is proliferating, particularly as devices move out of middle classes and into a wider spectrum in society where people are never going to own them individually.

I definitely saw women in middle-class homes in India who describe themselves as regular Internet users who had never touched a PC. The way they could say that was that they'd been dictating messages to children and grandchildren, and those messages were being inputted into the computer."