This article published in the NY Times a few days ago highlights such a concept. It discusses Jan Chipchases' job as a marketing researcher for Nokia, a Finnish cell phone company. He travels the world taking pictures of where and how people are using their phones. Consider this bit from the article:
Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.
How intriguing is this? I love design and I especially love to celebrate it. I am beginning to think it is an essential part of unearthing enough stamina to continue living joyfully in such a degraded and haphazard world sometimes. God called us to be co-creators. But when is the line crossed that demarcates creating useful products to help ease the hardship of life verses selling more crap to people who cant' afford new crap by making them think that they need new crap in order to live a less crap-filled existance? Not that people in Mumbai live crappy lives, that's not the point. The point is, does this guy really need a phone that hangs on a hook? If so, by all means I want to be the first to praise Nokia for their anthropolgical astuteness and willingness to go to the corners of the earth to help ease the trouble of poverty. But, pardon my skepticism, I just don't think that's their goal. So what is to be done then?
Because I do think it's cool that this is creating business ventures and other opportunities for "success" outside of any materialism it may or may not be promoting. The article reports that 80% of the world's population lives within cellphone range, and 68% of worldwide cellphone subscriptions are in the developing world.
“You don’t even need to own a cellphone to benefit from one,” says Paul Polak, author of “Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail” and former president of International Development Enterprises, a nonprofit company specializing in training and technology for small-plot farmers in developing countries. Part of I.D.E.’s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale. “People making a dollar a day can’t afford a cellphone, but if they start making more profit in their farming, you can bet they’ll buy a phone as a next step,” Polak says.
So this highlights a different point. Technology designed to boost our convenience levels in life can actually be life-saving devices for people who need more efficient ways to acquire knowledge and information in other places on our planet. So if this is the end result of Nokia and other companies--more power to 'em! This can serve as a great example of business truly helping consumer, and of that, I am a fan.
Here's an example to finish the post.
A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.
Go here to donate your old cell phone(s). If it doesn't work anymore, they will donate a cash equivalent to the phone's current value. Cool!
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