As Executive Creative Director of global insights for frog design, Jan Chipchase travels around the world and inside our pockets in search of behavioral patterns that will inform the design of products we don't even know we want. Yet.

Why you should listen

Jan Chipcase can guess what's inside your bag and knows all about the secret contents of your refrigerator. It isn't a second sight or a carnival trick; he knows about the ways we think and act because he's spent years studying our behavioral patterns. He's traveled from country to country to learn everything he can about what makes us tick, from our relationship to our phones (hint: it's deep, and it's real) to where we stow our keys each night. He oversees the creative direction of frog design , an innovation firm that advises the design products for Microsoft Office, Nike, UNICEF, GE, Sephora, Gatorade and Alitalia.

Before moving to frog design, Jan's discoveries and insights helped to inspire the development of the next generations of phones and services at Nokia. As he put it, if he does his job right, you should be seeing the results of his research hitting the streets and airwaves within the next 3 to 15 years.

What others say

“A trove of mobile trivia, Mr Chipchase (actual job title: principal researcher) knows, first-hand, that burkha-wearing students in Iran cheat in exams using hidden Bluetooth headsets; that 50 per cent of the world’s women keep their phones in their handbags (and miss 30 per cent of their calls); and that most Asian early adopters who watch mobile TV ignore the mobile part and tune in from home” — Times UK

Jan Chipchase’s TED talk

More news and ideas from Jan Chipchase

Jan Chipchase's quest

April 12, 2008

Photo: Shaul Schwarz/Reportage, for The New York Times. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company The New York Times Magazine recently tagged along with Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase and got an arresting look at the impact of mobile phones in the Third World. Chipchase, a “user anthropologist,” spoke at TED in 2007 to talk about […]

Continue reading
Design

Our cell phones, ourselves: Jan Chipchase on TED.com

October 18, 2007

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase investigates the ways we interact with technology — a quest that has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. Along the way, he’s made some unexpected discoveries: about the ways illiterate people use their mobile phones, the new roles the mobile can play in global […]

Continue reading