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and cure cancer…

Despite newspaper sub-editors love hyperbole (hey you are reading this aren’t you) sometimes the sensationally headlined articles are worth reading.

In last year’s closing keynote presentation, the inspiring Mark Pesce mentioned the adoption of mobile phones in the fishing markets of Kerala in southern India, and how these have greatly improved the lives of many in that part of the world. To me at least, this was a wonderful antidote to those who criticise the one laptop per child project with the argument that “poor people need food not technology”. Mark demonstrated that in fact, technology helps people emerge from poverty under their own steam – an inspiring message, compared with the “feed the world” paternalism of earlier well intentioned, but far from successful approaches to addressing global inequality.

So, what’s the point of the headline? Well, you’ll find a long article in the New York Times Magazine with that title that is well worth a read. It focusses on the work of Jan Chipchase, a human-behavior researcher as Nokia, who seems to spend his life wandering the earth (and to just major western capitals, but Africa, the former soviet republics east of the Urals, and other more out of the way places) trying to learn a little more about how people use technology in their lives.

Well worth a read with your morning cuppa.

It’s actually a big week for Chipchase, as he is also cited in a special report on “digital nomads” (I think I’m even less of a fan of pseudo-categories like “digital nomads” than hyperbolic headlines, but they seem to work for other folks) by the esteemed Economist Magazine (you have to pay for the full report, though there is a quite substantial introductory article online).

Above all what is interesting about these articles, is that it indicates that many of the approaches to design and analysis that have come to prominence on the web, and which we’ve featured at previous conferences, things like “user centred design“, and “design ethnography” are becoming mainstream concepts.

We’ll continue to focus on these approaches and issues at Web Directions (in Melbourne for example, we have a presentation by Dr. Jackie Moyes, now at News Digital Media, to help teams get their companies to adopt more user-centred design approaches), and it is really encouraging to see them more widely adopted and understood.