As a guy who has a degree in Industrial Design, I really love to come across really cool ways that companies do market research.  Even though I took the graphic/web design road after college, I never have gotten over all the cool aspects of really well done product development and design.  

In this case, Nokia has really done what I think would be an incredibly fun project to help understand their product end users on a very global scale.  They had people from around the world develop phone concepts that fit their personal needs [below- the foot phone?  I am not too sure how that ties in, but whatever].  

Business Week put together a nice article to highlight some of this project that Nokia has been working on, and it is not only a fun read, but really pretty fascinating to see how people from all over think about the way they use a product — in this case a cell phone.

Check out the excerpt below to get an idea of how things all came together or just click over the article to see the full thing, but don’t miss this.  This is very cool.  Enjoy this small sample of the many sketches that are in the full article.

An excerpt from a recent article in Business Week:

“In the three rapidly growing cities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Accra (Ghana), Nokia’s design team set up open studios where members of the local community could sketch their dream phones. Nokia provided the space and the drawing tools, and more than 220 people offered up their vision of the ideal handset. Pictured is Sam from Accra with his design. Nokia asked participants to address the following questions:

What does it look like?

What does it do?

How will you use it?

When and where will you use it?”

NOTE:  If you can get past the artistic ability and really dive into the thought process behind the many concepts, this is really a cool read.  

Check out the article here.