The Designer as Indiana Jones

The December 6, 2010 issue of Fortune (Technology's Roving R&D Man) has a profile of Jan Chipchase - - who is with Frog Design, a San Francisco design consultancy.  Chipchae is a good example of the type of individual the engineering professions need more of - - part cultural anthropologist and explorer, and part designer and entrepreneur (I also think this is a good career field for the right high school or college student to consider).  He travels the world trying to understand the interaction between people and technology, such as "Why the planet's poorest people would use cellphones and other gadgets?"

While at Nokia, Chipchase was the first to write about the use of airtime as a form of currency.  Chipchase documented Uganda's sente system, in which villagers transfer money across distances by buying and passing along cellphone minutes.  Vodafone, the U.K. - based mobile-phone operator, later launched a similar money service in Kenya.

This is good business - - not an academic exercise.  When four billion people need something, and a billion has nine zeros, the motivation is profit.  Look at the potential growth - - you can focus on Troy, New York or Accra, Ghana.  Arithmetic doesn't lie.

Chipchase travels light, keeping his mixed-gender, multi-language (at your next project meeting, calculate your team's gender ratio and the number of different languages the group speaks) teams to just two or three people.  His attention to cultural details wins him trust more quickly in communities.  He passed, for example, when workers offered him tea at Jalalabad during Ramadan, when Muslims don't eat or drink during the day.  And most important, he questions every assumption.  "Anyone who tells you he really understands what's going on is lying to himself," says Chipchase.

Frog Design has a great website - - especially check out their blogs.

Frog Design