Mobile Impact

I recently participated in a Design Roundtable at Fast Company on the incredible impact of cellphones as well as some thoughts on how they might evolve in the future. Happy to be in such great company with the other design experts: Ravi Sawhney, Mark Dziersk and Ken Carbone. Thought it would be nice to throw out the full text of my response to the questions:

How have cellphones changed our behavior -- and were they designed with that in mind?

The Apple app store marks a profound change in our experience of mobile technologies. We are finally moving past the core design problem of making the basic capabilities of mobile devices work. And considering, instead, all of the experiences that mobility and connectivity can enable in areas like health, education and entertainment. We are moving from designing the experience OF mobile devices to designing the experience WITH mobile devices.

At frog we have spent the last 10-15 years conceiving of different models for the types of experiences mobility will enable. For the first time we have the opportunity to make them real at relatively low cost through the app store. To see if they work in time and space. To see if they make sense in the palm of your hand, in specific situations. We are literally mining a decade or more of concepts that were impossible to get to market in the past. With the iPhone, it's not just possible to get them ON a device. But they can TAKE OVER the device – Apple was even nice enough to put their logo on the back, out of the way.

It is remarkable to me how it has taken the iPhone to create this momentum in the US market. To get people to engage with mobile experiences outside of basic communication. When I travel outside the USA, particularly in the developing world, the engagement with mobile devices is so much higher. Mobile minutes are quickly becoming the most liquid currency in africa and other emerging markets. Even in very remote regions, you see people using their devices to transact and fullfill a broader range of needs than we see here in the USA. And that is with the most basic Nokia phone. Forget multi-touch.

How can cellphones be used to improve the world?

We need to think about scarcity and abundance in a different way. How else do you explain the fact that someone earning $2 a day will spend 20-25% of their income on mobile minutes. Density and connectivity are the keys drivers of social transformation and mobile technologies are the medium. There may be a scarcity of financial resources in the the developing world but their is an abundance of social resources. This is no longer about leapfrogging the wired telecommunications infrastructure. The effects are far more profound in terms of economic development and social transformation.

I spend a great deal of time working with social impact initiatives in health, agriculture and conservation and in almost every case the key point of leverage is mobile technologies.  And what most designers don't realize or want to realize is the degree to which the most basic platforms like SMS, USSD and Voicemail can support rich services that create social value way beyond what we experience in the US market. Services that are far more profound than Urban Spoon. We are blinded by the iPhone and the Blackberry into thinking that these sophisticated gadgets are necessary to build rich applications. Just look at what Unicef is doing with rapidSMS and rapidAndroid to transform healthcare delivery and respond to global emergencies like famine, disease and warfare.

What industries will be profoundly changed by the ubiquity of cellphones, and how?

What industries wont be? Name one? The industry that I am the most engaged with right now is healthcare. Mobile technologies provide a direct access point for feedback and information that is sorely missing in the both developed and emerging markets. Most of the mHealth initiatives today target applications within the existing healthcare system. Ways for community health workers to gather and share information more accurately and efficiently.

But the big revolution will be in patient-centered care. It will be through initiatives like Project Masiluleke that put information directly into patient's hands so that they can make better decisions and manage their own care more effectively. This has equally profound implications in emerging markets like Africa, which are extremely resource-constrained, and developed markets like the USA where there is an abundance of resources that are being used extremely inefficiently.

Most of the cost issues in our current healthcare system are related to chronic conditions. To a system that focuses on treatment over prevention. The key to reversing these trends is a renewed focus on preventative care and self-management. And mobile technologies are a unique, cost-effective medium for driving this sort of behavior change.

What will cellphones look like or do, 10 years from now?

In 10 year the phone wont matter at all. We will have moved from a phone-based network to an account based network in which I can access all of my communications data from the cloud, from any phone or devices that is convenient. The tight coupling of my information to specific piece of hardware will be eliminated. Just like email has nothing to do with my PC anymore.

This is not just the future for those of us in developed markets with access to corporate IT support and MobileMe. This is the future for the masses. There is a desperate need for broad-based access in developing markets that doesn't require the ownership of a dedicated personal device. For services that allow someone to access their contacts, messaging and credit from any device, whether the phone belongs to their uncle or is a community phone. People will have multiple accounts. Employers will enable accounts as will local health workers so that people can access sensitive information related to HIV or TB without having to compromise the confidentiality of this information on a shared device. This revolution is starting right now with companies like MoVirtu.

As frog's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant leads efforts to expand the impact of design into new markets and industries. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert is lead partner in Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat HIV and AIDS in South Africa. He is an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.