Interview: the cellphone anthropologist
The New Scientist has published an interview with Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase:
“Most of us take mobile phones for granted. Not so for Jan Chipchase, a design researcher for Nokia, who travels the globe exploring how people use their mobile devices, discovering how to make them better, how to reach the billions of people who don’t own a phone – and learning a whole lot about people along the way. Jason Palmer caught up with him in Japan – by phone of course – and found that nothing about the mobile phone is as straightforward as it seems.”
Of English and German parentage, 38-year-old Jan Chipchase grew up in London and studied economics at London Guildhall University, going on to do a master’s in user interface design in 1992. He then worked at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. In 1999 he moved to Japan, where he still lives, and joined Nokia’s usability group. He became a member of the Nokia design group last year.
(via Usability in the News)
