Mobile Essentials: Field Study and Concepting - 31 July 2007

Mobile essentials refers to the objects most people consider essential and carry most of the time whilst out and about. This paper describes a cross-cultural field study of what people consider to be mobile essentials, how those mobile essentials are carried and problems typically encountered. Through careful field observations and in-depth interviews of 17 participants in four cities, transitions between different situations turned out to be critical moments in which mobile essentials took on specific value, but also created problems of forgetting and loss. This paper introduces the notions of Center of Gravity, Point of Reflection and the Range of Distribution to describe user behaviours. Based on the study findings nine product concepts related to mobile essentials were developed, one of which is presented in this paper.