“I’ve got a fair idea of what you’re carrying in your pockets,” Jan Chipchase says, somewhat ominously. “I spend a lot of time rooting around in people’s bags. And fridges.”

So goes the opening gambit of a self-described “professional, authorised stalker”. Employed by Nokia, the largest mobile phone maker, he tracks human behaviour around the world to help to design the phones of the future.

A trove of mobile trivia, Mr Chipchase (actual job title: principal researcher) knows, first-hand, that burkha-wearing students in Iran cheat in exams using hidden Bluetooth headsets; that 50 per cent of the world’s women keep their phones in their handbags (and miss 30 per cent of their calls); and that most Asian early adopters who watch mobile TV ignore the mobile part and tune in from home.

In the past year, he has left his Tokyo base to visit 15 countries. He has studied the behaviour of mobile-phone owners from the shanty towns of Soweto to the bedrooms of Seoul’s painfully tech-savvy teens, trying to work out what handsets will look like 15 years from now.

“So I’ve got a dream job, right?” he says. “I’m pretty sure you’d like my job.”

Up to a point. Trekking across continents with camera and notebook does sound more fun than running focus groups and surveys – the more traditional means companies use to gauge future trends – but this is a man who can talk, with ease, for 15 minutes about how most people who own a mobile phone in the world choose to attach a strap to it.

The end result may be niche knowledge, but Nokia is not the only company to invest in this kind of “human behavioural field research” or “corporate ethnography”. Mat Hunter, of IDEO, a behavioural consultancy whose clients include Kodak, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, says: “Classic market research doesn’t go far enough. It can’t grasp what people can’t imagine or articulate. Think of the Henry Ford quote: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ ”

Hoping to design products that people don’t yet know they want – often termed “latent needs” – design teams now employ legions of psychologists and anthropologists. Often they examine “extreme groups”. Cosmetics companies, for example, have studied transvestites’ make-up habits, hoping to incorporate habits found at the margins of society in tomorrow’s mainstream products. Firms that make handheld devices are studying the habits of homeless people – considered to be experts in mobile living.

Mr Hunter says: “There’s another quote, from William Gibson, which says: ‘The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.’ ”

The results, in retrospect, often seem obvious. In one project, Bank of America picked up on how mothers often gather loose change in a jar at home – seemingly regarding the coins as “worthless money”. Hoping to tap into the same behaviour, it launched a “Keep the Change” savings account, where users have the option of rounding up debit card payments to the nearest dollar and depositing the change. Two years on, more than three million customers have signed up, a third of them new accounts. Late last year, Lloyds TSB brought the idea to Britain.

Analogies are also popular. IDEO was involved in a project in which hospital accident and emergency consultants were taken to a car race track to see how pit crews work. It was suggested that the doctors consider setting up new “toolkits” for the most common procedures – they did.

For Nokia, the main aim is to sell phones in new markets. It is estimated that three billion of the world’s 6.3 billion people have “cellular connectivity”. A further one billion is forecast in the next two years. It is because he wants to put phones in those new users’ pockets that Mr Chipchase knows what’s probably in yours (keys, money, mobile – it’s a mantra most of us repeat before leaving home, no matter where we live).

Emerging markets’ potential explains Mr Chipchase’s taste for mobile minutiae. Nokia’s patchy record – it missed a trend towards clamshell phones – is also factor. His basic mission, however, is to root out the motivation behind people’s behaviour, on the basis that it will not alter by the year 2022.

He is particularly interested in ad hoc mobile banking that has sprung up in Uganda, which uses prepayment systems as deposit accounts and relies on shopowners to make good promises to turn credits back into cash. “The question is: how do we design for people’s needs?” he says.

Mobile phone straps may be seen as “for girls” by male Londoners, but are all the rage in “collectivist societies”, such as China. So, if phone straps tap into human behaviour in a way that will make them an enduring feature, can mobile makers take the idea forward by turning them into part of a device’s display, perhaps?“Technology,” Mr Chipchase says, “changes quickly. Human behaviour changes pretty slowly.”

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