Mobile phone usage concepts
Interactive Product and Service Design of Personal Area Mobility

Introduction | Design challenge | Conceptual design work | Results

A number of pre-determined words representing the goals of the design guided the work:

• Innovation
• Adaptability
• Tangible computing

Market research initiated the first phase of the work and helped identify a landscape overview of other offers. The analysis of competitors provided scaffolds for the innovation phase where an understanding of the baseline of technological achievements worked as a springboard.

The target user group was ‘early adopters’ of mobile technologies and the designers used many different techniques to explore the design context. Different user-driven processes like interviews and observations were adopted and the major user contribution came during a workshop where users were asked to create physical models of mobile concepts.

Other user-driven methods applied during the workshop included bug-listing, remember the future and buy a feature.

Some trends were identified during the analysis of the workshop material that could later be represented by three personas.

Lars, 75. Lives in an apartment i Gothenburg. Alone with home health-care service. Easily forgets things. Children has moved abroad. Marlena, 43. Lives in a house in Malmö. HR-responsible at the City Theatre, with a career going. Husband and three kids. Loves her work but sustains fairly loose routines. Jonas, a.k.a. Lightfinder, 16. EMO-boy living with his parents in Åmål. Attending high-school, living for his free-time. Writes poetry and listens to Goth-music.