Backpackers and MoSoSo Design
May 20, 2005 | Levent OZLER
While mobile devices may not have been designed with community use in mind, several researchers in Australia are investigating how to create devices and services useful for community media.
Jeff Axup, a Ph.D candidate in the University of Queensland, Australia's Information Environments program, specializes in Mobile Community Design.
He's working from a challenging foundation: although mobile telephones -- both devices and services -- were never designed to support community uses, more and more SMSers, mobile IMers and Mobile Social Software experimenters are using their small-screen, tiny-keyboard devices to kludge together roving social networks, smart mobs and other forms of mobile community.
Axup and his colleagues believe good design begins with observing users in their natural environment.
Axup is participating in a study led by Stephen Viller in the Communities and Places project, funded by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID).
Sensibly, the research starts by looking at the ways people are appropriating existing technologies for MoSoSo uses and at the obstacles current devices and services present to their activities.
Only then, after extensive examination of actual users struggling with actual technologies, do they intend to go about designing devices and services that would make mobile
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