Backpackers And MoSoSo Design

ACID LogoHoward Reingold has interviewed Jeff Axup, a PhD student working in a project funded by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). He’s studying the way communities work to find out what mobile applications they need…
“First, I would recommend that design teams look at existing cooperation in mobile communities, with or without the use of technologies,” he replied. “Although there will be opportunities to support entirely new behaviors, don’t discount the value of augmenting existing behaviors and overcoming existing obstacles. Presumably, teens already had trouble using phones to talk to each other from noisy bars, and already wanted to send inexpensive flirty messages without their parents’ knowledge before texting came along. An ethnographer following these groups of young people as they went about their daily activities would have noticed the difficulties they encountered in negotiating their social lives. Finding technology solutions to coordination problems is a good place to start conceptualizing new mobile cooperative technologies.”
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