"The significance here is the participation of two of the world's largest brands supporting KU with real products and services for educational advancements,"Â said Gregory Thomas, chair of the design department. "Our students are in need of real-world challenges involving real-world industry, and we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to bring several schools together on one project."Â
Thomas has had a long-time relationship with Nokia's Design Director/Brand Experience Designer Gerardo Herrera. Shortly before the December holiday, a proposal was made for a cross-disciplinary project examining current and potential use of the sophisticated hardware. Nokia responded with a gift of up to six phones and additional hardware. Thomas then approached Cingular/AT&T and received six months activation and call/data usage for the project.
"Nokia has a positive impact on society that extends beyond the advanced technology products and services the company creates. Nokia is an active contributor to educational causes, with employees making their own contribution as volunteers in a range of programs throughout the world,"Â said Herrera. "Our design teams continue to explore collaborative connections of multidisciplinary educational teams to help create breakthrough innovations that enable a comprehensive approach of both the mobile and customer experience,"Â said Herrera. "Nokia Design is looking forward to KU's insight in this multi-disciplinary project, their use of AT&T services and our Nokia mobile devices."Â
Nancy Garvey, Vice President/General Manager with AT&T Wireless in Kansas and Missouri added, "Cingular is committed to the communities in which it serves. We strive to be on the cutting edge of technology, and research projects like this one are just one more way we are being innovative in this industry."Â
A common thread that would bring all three KU units - Journalism, Business and Design - working together was all that was needed. Journalism's Rick Musser, head of the news and information track, quickly embraced a concept of journalism students identifying applications for a device specific to the youth market. The journalism students would experiment with the phone on blogs, vlogs and explore MoJo (mobile journalism) applications.
"The last year has seen video applications on the Internet explode onto the media scene,"Â Musser said. "Advanced journalism students in our multimedia newsroom will put these multi-use phones to the test under real-world conditions."Â
Wally Meyer, Director of Entrepreneurship Programs for the School of Business, was then invited because of the recent collaborations between design and the business school. The Entrepreneurship Program will identify the size and trend of the addressable market, the likely Nokia market share and sales potential and costs associated with market entry, all while recognizing the unique media consumption habits of the college target audience and the competitive nature of the category.
"This project provides the students with a true experiential learning opportunity in which the business students will apply their entrepreneurial knowledge acquired from their business classes to a real world business challenge," Meyer said.
Design will approach the project from several angles. The industrial design area will examine the ergonomics and functionality of the N93 and N73, interaction design will analyze the navigational components and the graphic design area will create a blog and other media tools to facilitate communication between all teams and document the educational process for the school's industry partners.
This learning project will seek to capitalize on the emerging phenomena of citizen journalism while also creating a business proposition for the Nokia phone/camera with the key college market in mind. Students will learn by leveraging their own expertise and contributing valuable insights from their own disciplines as well as via the interaction from the other disciplines of journalism, design and business.
Nokia, Finland's largest company, is the number one cellular phone producer in the world. More than 850 million people have a Nokia mobile phone in their hands. No other consumer electronics company in the world has ever had such a customer base. In 2006, Nokia was the world's largest camera manufacturer with approximately 140 million cameras sold as well as close to 70 million music enabled devices, making Nokia the world's largest manufacturer of music devices as well. AT&T's wireless unit is the largest wireless company in the United States, with more than 60 million subscribers who use the nation's largest digital voice and data network. -- www2.ku.edu
Posted March 5th, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
