For years, in the "North-West" (that is industrialized countries - usually understood as North vs. South and West vs. East), we've been babbling about the "digital gap" that is supposedly the new line of division, usually understood as running along that of economical and political development. We often have quite a simplistic idea of the situation, imagining countries that are like technological deserts, on top of being devoid of everything essentials for a normal life (that is one car per family, two TV-sets per household, all with at least 40 channels, and 4-weeks vacations in the Bahamas or in the Swiss Alps per years). We tend to forget the forest of satellite dishes that are ornementing most cities and even village buildings in what we used (politcally) incorrectly call "third world" countries. And a recent article from the Mail & Guardian, translated in French in the Courrier International, just reminds us how wrong we often are about the appropriation of "our" modern technologies by people in these countries.

Genevieve Bell grew up in Australia, moving between the working class suburbs of Melbourne and Canberra and the Aboriginal communities of Central and Northern Australia. She has a PhD in anthropology and works as Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group. There she manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers.

Ethnographic research is increasingly figured as a foundation for design practice, but the questions of just how these two approaches should be combined remain largely unanswered. In particular, designers often turn to ethnographic work more for marketing data than for cultural understandings. Drawing on some recent studies of mobility and privacy, I will outline an alternative approach that attempts to take ethnography seriously.

Paul Dourish has worked at Apple and at Xerox PARC, and is currently a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of computer science and social science, and he is known particularly for his research in the areas of Ubiquitous Computing, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Human-Computer Interaction.

His book, "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction" was published by MIT Press in 2001; it explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the embodied experience of interactive and computational systems. He is currently on sabbatical at Stanford, working on book projects on social informatics and cultural aspects of ubiquitous computing.

Younghee Jung talks about how Nokia explores the different usages of their mobile phones by customers to gain valuable insight on future products design.

What can ethnographical research reveal about the people's use of technologies that classical marketing studies miss? This is the question for which Yonghee Jung and Genevieve Bell, both anthropologists working in design teams for two high tech companies, have offered some answers. Paul Dourish, as the academic anthropologist has somewhat played the devil's advocate by pointing out that such "design ethnographies" also have weak points, that should be taken into account.

Yonghee Jung showed how people can get emotionally and even symbolically involved with the mobile technologies of their daily lives. She took as example one of the projects of her design team, called Nokia Open Studio (NOS), as an example of this phenomenon. The NOS aimed at putting people back at the heart of technology design by sending anthropologists to actually ask them what kind of mobile phone would be most useful to them. Three teams were sent for 2 weeks in three different communities: one in Mumbai, India, another in Rio, Brazil and a third in Accra, capital of Ghana. Since the time they had at hand was short, they mixed several methods (ethnography, street surveys and group meetings) to maximize their capacity to get as much insights from these people as possible. They offered these people to design the mobile phone of their dream and offered an award to the best one. It allowed the NOS team to analyze how these people understand what mobile phone are meant for, how they should be used and what specific needs related to their daily routine they should fullfill.

I'll be happy to receive your comments about the conference, in addition to content you like on the Web and find relevant to the LIFT Experience 08!

We'll print your contributions in the "Not So empty Book", which will be distributed onsite.

Feel free to come and talk to me during LIFT or reply directly on this blog.

Thank you!

Marie Laure
Editor, Not So Empty Book

Another official request from LIFT art director…to all participants!!

LIFT is not only about digital bits. Share with the lift community the message that touched you most last year in your online environments. Copy-paste the touching message, post, author or comment and send it to editor@liftconference.com We will then print a magazine during the conference!

Digital content is very fragile and can easily be corrupted, copied or altered, and because we believe in the value of printed materials as a good way to keep a track of an experience like LIFT, we decided to print, during the conference, various booklets, simply printed and binded. For visual thinkers like us, the booklet is also a good way to show drawings and photos in a better quality than on a screen, also to use, for example, the fontself project and to question some ideas…big ideas from our speakers! These booklets are part of a collection which content will be published together in a more sophisticated book….oh yeahhh…one day will get there!

This project began during LIFT07. Not so empty book is part of “Artist’s Work in Progress Projects”, supported by Swiss Conféderation , Office Féderal de la Culture, sitemapping. more projects here: http://www.letearoom.ch

Thursday 8 November is World Usability Day!

To celebrate this worldwide event, Telono, a Geneva-based user experience consultancy, is happy to invite you to some after-work drinks in one of Geneva's trendiest lounge bars!

Please register via the link below:
http://wud-geneva.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see some of you there!
Florian.-