A Korean electronics company called LGE has launched a “a mobile phone with an embedded compass to allow Muslim users to locate the direction of Mecca.”


One of the company’s senior designers says the idea was to create a phone “whose concept is reflected in the situation or culture of its actual place.” That’s a very big challenge indeed, particularly given the Western cultural assumptions that tend to dominate technology product development and design. It’s a challenge that had Intel sending a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Genevieve Bell, to “100 households in 19 cities in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific” over the last two years.

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Via Cool News.