Jan Chipchase: Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

published Apr 17, 2008
Jan Chipchase Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty
Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset.

For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a "human-behavior researcher." He's also sometimes referred to as a "user anthropologist." To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique.

His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company - to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit.

Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia's nine design studios around the world.

Almost always, some explanation is necessary.