Challenges and opportunities of
technology in society
Next event: LIFT Asia, 4-5 September 2008
I am a product and interaction designer by education, exploratory design researcher by practice. I work with or get help from people of various profiles - typically called consumers or customers - in most of my projects. My role is to sketch new possibilities enabled by mobile technology, by understanding people's current everyday lives. Sometimes my work is about showing the potentials, but sometimes it is about being the devil's advocate for the direction of technology and product development.
My research topics have no boundaries as long as they center around what people do and communicate: People who use digital media, people in love, people who take digital photographs, teenagers texting a lot, people who commute and might explore their home city, people who use phonebooks and calendars on mobile phones, people who have mobile digital tools to socialize, Asian women, people who live in shanty towns,.... Those topics are selected equally from our insights as trend readers as well as our company's strategic direction.
Inherently developing new ways of working with people is an increasingly important part of my job. Recently my team has been working on a few projects that invited people to be designers of their future technology and talk about why it is relevant for their lives.
I earned my master's in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University as Fulbright scholar, and studied industrial design in KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). I fled to the world of design on the verge of becoming a mathematician, realizing that my everlasting curiosity about people can only be satisfied by studying design. I joined Nokia in Helsinki in 2000, and currently live and work in Tokyo.