Anne Kirah is Senior Design Anthropologist for Microsoft. She lives in Paris. She points to some of the oddities (from a US pov) of how cyworld.com (Korea) and Almererulez (Netherlands) are used. She gives lots of great examples of how cultural norms affect the take-up of tech, especially IM, text messaging, and the like.

Genevieve Bell from Intel Research points out that technology is not just going to be in our hands as we commute, it’s going to be in rural villages, powered by truck batteries, etc. We’ll see work-arounds to unexpected problems, she says, such as cellphone charging stations. She says the most popular phone service in China is a novella being sent out to cellphones via subscription, in part because cellphones can display 120 words, not just 120 characters. She says 30% of Koreans with Internet connections at home nevertheless use cyber-cafes because of the social millieu and because there is fragmentation across devices. She talks about the Indonesian e-mosque project, providing access through mosques because they are close to ubiquitous; Indonesia built access into the existing infastructure.

In most of Africa, she says, “flashing and peeping” predominate: You signal that you’ve arrived somewhere by calling home and hanging up. Families have developed remarkably sophisticated codes: Call once means “Where are you going?” Call twice means “I’ve arrived,” etc. She says that 95% of calls are incomplete. And flashing and peeping are being adopted by the African community in Europe.

Her conclusions: We should think more broadly about what computers can or should do, and we should be prepared to critically interrogate taken-for-granted terms and ideas. We could even look outside of the US for new technology cutures and design inspirations. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

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