Though many people in Denmark and Europe consider the iPhone as an extremely expensive mobile phone, the concept is quite the opposite in USA. Many low income people in the US don’t have a spare income to invest in a (laptop) computer as well as a broadband connection, and are thus using the iPhone for all the internet business.

Just a funny thought when you compare our ways of using the potentials of the (i)phone…

Supplementary reading at TechWorld…

And now for the funny iPhone-image-f-the-day :-)

On my recent vacation in Egypt I saw this ATM. I needed money, but I still walked around for almost an hour to find a bank that I felt looked reasonably safe and trustworthy.

A bank with an armed guard outside gave me more confidence that I wouldn’t get cheated than with the ATM shown in the picture.

How does this translate into design? First of all, the company producing the ATM has absolutely no understanding of the problems and challenges their client, the bank, has. And the bank has no understanding of their client, the person walking up to an ATM.

Just few days of channel service analysis might have saved all 3 parties (manufacturer, bank and client) from embarrasment, distrust and annoyance.

If a designer had been involved in the process, the manufacturer could have found a better solution for the banks challenges, the clients would still feel confident about the banks services and the bank would make more money.

Who should now feel cheated?

Flew over Las Vegas a few months ago (landed there too) and got a shock as you do sometimes seeing a city from above. This picture shows just a tiny part of the area of the city, where two million people live. Looks like a city made by a harvesting machine – and 95% of inhabitants work in service or entertainment (not a lot of production going on there).

This city didn’t really exist 60 years ago. There’s a sci-fi feeling to it, maybe because we know that more and more people move to the cities to work in service or entertainment, as manual labour is taken over by machines.

It might well be a picture of our future seen from above…(and with global warming, maybe even the weather in northern Europe would become more like Las Vegas – one can hope:-)