Intrigued to see this promo by mobile telco Orange to bring mobile phone chargers that you pump by hand into concert venues for the summer. There’s an angle here about sustainability but I was most excited to see that the service providers are really thinking about the needs clearly, the idea that summer festivals bring groups of people together to interact and text, send pictures, and so on, and that when you’re in an environment like that, there’s no access to power. It may simply be a promotion but it’s a powerful acknowledgement of need and ties nicely to some of what we’re uncovering in our current Charging Up research project, especially as we begin to focus on key needs and heading into ideation.

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Most people have fully integrated their mobiles in their everyday life nowadays and would have a hard time imagining how to organize their social circles without it. Yet, it is not the mobile that sets the norm for how social life is organized, it’s still people who do that. Therefore companies like T-Mobile can learn a lot from how people actually organize their social life a broad sense (as opposed to how people use their phones) when they want to develop new concepts for mobile internet. Spur and STBY did fieldwork in Berlin and Tokyo and worked with a T-Mobile team to set up the research and organize the workshops that used the results to create insights and ideas.

We worked extensively with video in this project, using the small and easy to operate Flip Video which we gave to participants to film moments in their life for us. In the picture you see Bas Raijmakers transferring the clips one participant made onto his computer, to discuss them during the home visit. To prepare, participants had received the Flip camera and a set of nicely designed instructions a few weeks before. They each made some 30-40 clips for us. We edited those clips into short films of 1-3 minutes each.

Later in the insights and ideas workshops we used the short films in two different ways: as inspiration for creating the insights and ideas. And later, once we had developed these in more detail we used the films to back them up, as evidence. Because we used a video diary approach, the films became often very personal and intimate which was great for the topic we wanted to explore: how do people organize their social life. From this research resulted almost 30 detailed ideas for new services which are currently further developed by T-Mobile.

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