The ubiquitous cell phone is opening up vistas for designing cultural experiences that are definitely not like Saturday afternoon at the opera. From more effective ways to involving users in product and program design, to challenging conventional approaches to the design process itself, mobile phones are changing the way we communicate and learn.
Mobile Nation, edited by Martha Ladly and Philip Beesley, is a compendium of research methodologies that incorporate wireless communication technology. The book comes out of a 2007 conference featuring submissions from members of the Mobile Digital Commons Network. The network includes researchers from:
- Concordia University
- The Banff New Media Institute
- York University
- The Ontario College of Art and Design.
The books’ contributors have a larger goal, to foster collaboration between different communities. Engineers, communicators and all manner of designers inhabit the pages of Mobile Nation. User participation is a key theme, along with adapting mobile technologies for other platforms like the Web 2.0, traditional media and broadcast media.
User Participation in Design
Good designers consult the user at some stage in the design process. Typically, the user is either briefly surveyed during the pre-design process, or involved in testing an application. The design might be for a building or it could be an educational experience. User integration, the term for involving users in a more meaningful way, emphasizes participant co-creation rather than consultation. It is a process of inquiry and communal knowledge construction.
In a chapter entitled, “Play as Research,” Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab describes how he designs digital games with potential users. Unlike market research, which treats the public as consumers, Zimmerman’s design approach continuously circles back to users to ensure they are having fun and that play is intuitive.
Zimmerman’s preoccupation with producing a delightful experience reflects the social nature of mobile phones. What comes through in the submissions to Mobile Nation is that by using a technology that is associated with social media, learning is richer for designers and participants.
Using Mobile Technology to Enhance Urban and Wildlife User Experience
Editor Martha Ladly describes the Park Walk project as evidence that mobile technology can enhance an urban or wilderness park experience. Ladly’s group conducted field studies in Banff National Park, Toronto’s High Park and Mount Royal Park in Montreal. Researchers explored how participants with specially equipped cell phones could enjoy a memorable park experience through listening to stories and information on their mobile phones.
Participants’ cell phones were connected via Bluetooth with a GPS device to enable them to enter a location and then hear/see information on that location. The Park Walk users left no physical trace of their park visits, yet were able to contribute to subsequent users’ experience of that space through digital artifacts they recorded while walking through the sites.
Iterative Design Processes and Mobile Platforms
One of the key findings of researchers in this emerging field is that because mobile phone use is social in nature, conventional, linear design methodologies are unsatisfactory for conducting research. A good part of the book examines alternative scenarios for conducting design, in particular the iterative process.
In an iterative process, project design is not a top-down procedure. Design goes through a process of designing, testing, measuring and re-designing. Opportunities for user input are enhanced, and include stories, images and personal reflections which shape the final design. Shawn Micallef‘s [murmur] project is an example of a location-based cell phone application that documents users’ experience in navigating through cities.
Mobile Nation is a valuable contribution to understanding the potential of mobile platforms. Its language, however, is scholarly to a fault. Let’s hope the book’s contributors find ways to convey their ideas in plain English, thereby reaching a wider audience. With everyone owning a cell phone, we can all participate in the fun.
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