Dai Nippon Printing Co, Ltd. (DNP), one of the world's largest printing companies, is well-acquainted with the growing shift from paper to digital media worldwide. Consumers are demanding ever more rich and customizable digital content, ideally accessible by mobile devices. This trend is especially dramatic in Japan, where access to advanced content on the mobile web has been ubiquitous for years. DNP approached PARC to collaborate in creating innovative, consumer-friendly mobile digital media technologies for Japanese use. They then collaborated in a joint project with PARC fieldworkers and technologists in applying a user-centered approach to innovation design.

This project (codenamed “Magitti”) lasted over two years and comprised several phases, including: opportunity discovery and assessment, technology design and feasibility testing, platform engineering, and technology transfer. PARC design fieldworkers played a primary role in leading the opportunity discovery and assessment efforts. We led brainstorming sessions and workshops with DNP and PARC technologists, and we worked to clarify and prioritize a range of promising candidate design concepts. We then performed extensive field studies in Tokyo to obtain further design insights and requirements, and targeted user feedback on increasingly refined design prototypes. The project concept evolved into a working prototype of a context-aware leisure guide for young adults “on the go” in Tokyo. Further developed and refined by DNP, it is currently available as an iPhone app in Japan called “Machireco” (“town recommendations”). See Bellotti et al. (2008) for a comprehensive technical overview of the project and its relation to previous technologies.