Jan Chipchase's Cool Tech Job

What is your current title?
Senior Design Strategist, Nokia Design in Calabasas, Calif.

If you had to write an ad to fill your job, what would it say?
Wanted: Someone to predict the future. Must be willing to travel.

What's the coolest thing about your job?
Working with very talented team on projects that touch billions of people. Traveling to exotic parts of the world and hearing 'ordinary' people share some of their extraordinary lives. Living with one foot in the future.

What are at least five duties you have as part of your job?
1. Helping Nokia understand what and how we should be making, challenge assumptions about the future.

2. To do No. 1 right, I need to understand what is important for my internal clients and figure out how best to inform and inspire what they do.

3. The field work is probably the best known part of my job (I write about it on my blog). A lot of effort goes into running a field study: Putting together a great team, choosing where to conduct the research -- we often run the same study in different countries to compare cultural similarities and differences, figuring out the most appropriate people to research, and working out the right questions to ask. Answers are good -- but more often than not its about finding smarter questions.

4. All the research means nothing unless its fed back to the people who need to know -- so its about interpreting, listening, gauging who needs to know what when.
5. Bringing it full circle -- we use design techniques to communicate what we think is possible, where we think the company and the planet should be going.

What's the coolest thing you've done so far in your current job?
Where to start? Your readers would appreciate the efforts we make to maximize our time in the field - it tends to involve a lot of motorbikes.

Or taking a road trip across the United States and trying to rustle up interviewees in a gun range. Or talking with Tokyo teens about how they use bleeding edge technologies. See a full list of our locations here.

The coolest in terms of impact is the work on understanding illiteracy -- about one-sixth of the world's population is illiterate -- and the strategies they use to navigate a world of words and numbers. And ultimately designing our phones to be more usable for them.

The coolest is always yet to come: Next month we're running as study that will take us across China.

Does your career ever get dull or routine? How do you rekindle your love for it?
There's not much routine. If anything it's the opposite -- at it's worst I wake up and wonder which continent I'm in.

When the research is going in directions that are less fresh, where more of the variables are known I take time off work and fund my own projects. Somewhere along the line I usually figure out a way to relate it back to things that colleagues are interested in. When that's no longer possible it's time to move on.

Did you ever expect to have the career you have?
Yes, but wasn't aware how much opportunity this would bring.

My career, and those of my design studio colleagues probably fit into the category of 'in-between jobs' -- careers carved out of bits of other professions, with one eye on the future. It's better to invent a job than apply for a job.

What was your career path?
A degree in Development Economics and a Masters in Interface Design. Interface designer for 10 years in the United Kingdom, eight years in Nokia's research lab in Tokyo and recently moved to the Nokia design studio in Los Angeles.

Do you have advice for how people can find their own cool job and live out their passions?
Once you've figured out who you are and whom you want to be, the only thing holding you back is yourself.

MORE Q&As

Back to Discovery Tech