Pattern Recognition

Last week Jan Chipchase gave a good talk about Pattern Recognition at PSFK’s Good Ideas Conference here in New York hosted by JWT.  For those of you that don’t know, Jan works as an anthropologist for Nokia Research Center.  He travels the world looking for cultural context that Nokia can then leverage to create new offers.

Usually he presents to designers, who then go off and create industrial designs and interfaces, but strategically his work has lots of implications too.

The context in which we live in is changing and so is the origin of innovation. Of the 6.6 billion people on earth, 4 billion have mobile phones. The remaining 2.6 billion people are in emerging markets, often in remote locations with little or no infrastructure. Because no precedent behavior exist for using phones in these markets, the insight that Jan uncovers is really interesting.

For instance, telecom providers might be interested in what people in Africa are doing with SIM cards.  Essentially they are getting duel cellular service by combining two SIM cards and putting them back in a phone.  This means that a user can access duel networks for free. This is fascinating since this is innovation from the bottom-up in practice.

Similarly in Southeast Asia, Jan showed a bottle of gasoline propped up by a brick that translated into the bare essentials of a gas station. Such things in the world challenge us as designers or strategist to think about how much we can strip down a product/service to its essentials without losing the concept of the offer.

From my viewpoint his greater point was that no matter how fast technology changes, people’s underlying behaviors don’t.  If you can recognize the patterns across cultures you can begin to predict what people want in the future.

You can see more photos here and a version of the presentation here.

(George Crichlow)