Marko Ahtisaari, currently director of design strategy at Nokia, deconstructs the reasons for rapid deployment and adoption of cell-phones in his article Blogging Over Las Vegas.
- It's an object with a social function tied to a service
- Service providers subsidized the product to trade-off for customer relationships, preventing users from seeing the true cost of the elements, and rapidly speeding up adoption
- The shift from a collective shared object -- the family phone -- to a personal object that becomes an extension of the self
The rest of this interesting article explores the challenges of the future. The one that got my attention is that we have not planned for how to disconnect in an era of "always on, always accessible". Maybe there's an opportunity there.
I am off to the Appreciative Inquiry event with David Cooperrider, and will report in on learnings on Thursday.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Putting People First for bringing this to my attention. A very interesting blog, don't go there if you only have five minutes.
