Jan Chipchase

“Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.”

“The mobile phone is used from when you get up in the morning and is often the last thing you interact with at night.”

“There's a whole load of stuff in life that is worth documenting. You see it every day but don't even notice.”

“Many retail stores have consumer trackers that study how long your eyes linger on one product, whether you follow it through by touch, and things that you buy. You can redesign things on a shelf, all by tracking such information.”

“At Nokia, we have an internal market for ideas. There could be someone in Nokia who wants research, and they will come to us.”

“The distance between who you are and who you might be is closing.”

“I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training.”

“China has a bigger middle class than the entire population of Europe.”

“I spend a lot of my time looking into people's bags and handbags - with their permission, of course.”

“Tokyo - still - offers the most tightly integrated infrastructure, where smooth, technology-driven experiences take place when engaging in everyday actions, such as verifying personal identity, paying for goods, and buying tickets.”

“There is close to zero trust in institutions in Afghanistan. The mobile carriers have more trust than the banks.”

“Even if you don't state your ethnic background anywhere on LinkedIn or whether you are married with children, a scan of your photos and other people's photos featuring you will make it far easier to deduce.”

“Technology, we find, amplifies behaviours. If you want to be anti-social, technology allows you to be. And vice versa.”

“As touch-screens have become more popular, they have retrained how we interact with images we see on many surfaces.”

“There are certain cities around the world where it's possible to learn about tomorrow's technology as it's being developed today.”

“From my time at Nokia, I've seen the 99% positive and occasionally negative impact that communication tools can have on people.”

“Facial recognition software is already quite accurate in measuring unchanging and unique ratios between facial features that identify you as you. It's like a fingerprint.”

“The ability to identify someone at a moment's notice by snapping a photo of him or her, to trigger an immediate influx of data about the person behind the face, will forever change the world.”

“I find buying a bicycle is a great way to stay in touch with people.”

“It will be interesting to see if Seoul's urban vocabulary of numerous, ever-present interactive screens will translate to other cities such as Beijing, London, and New York. It will also be intriguing to see if smaller cities and towns adopt aspects of Seoul's screen culture throughout Asia, Europe, and North America.”