I find buying a bicycle is a great way to stay in touch with 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.
What do you think is the world's most recognisable container of information? It's the human face. We are constantly reading each other and responding.
From my time at Nokia, I've seen the 99% positive and occasionally negative impact that communication tools can have on people.
China in particular is an absolutely fascinating place to be. Culturally and politically and economically it's becoming more and more relevant. If you look at how China is perceived in different parts of the world, you can recognize it's very dynamic. It's also challenging what it thinks of itself.
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.
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.
Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.
China is not a country, it's a continent. India is not a country, it's a continent.
China has a bigger middle class than the entire population of Europe.
There is close to zero trust in institutions in Afghanistan. The mobile carriers have more trust than the banks.
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.
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.
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.