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Life

Interview: The cellphone anthropologist

By Jason Palmer

11 June 2008

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Most of us take mobile phones for granted. Not so for Jan Chipchase, a design researcher for Nokia, who travels the globe exploring how people use their mobile devices, discovering how to make them better, how to reach the billions of people who don’t own a phone – and learning a whole lot about people along the way. Jason Palmer caught up with him in Japan – by phone of course – and found that nothing about the mobile phone is as straightforward as it seems

Watch a slideshow of Chipchase’s research images

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