Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend W. W. Norton & Company October 2013. 400 pages [Amazon link] Abstract An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile,…
My quest of understanding the mainstreaming of hacker culture is now also endorsed by the BBC: “The maze of electronics on a typical circuit board can be difficult to decipher, but as hackers and tinkerers grow in number, an industry…
In my ongoing exploration of the theme “we are all hackers now” (also the title of a talk I will give on 29 June in Brussels), I once again found quite a lot of recently published supporting material. We build…
For months now, I have been running with this simple thesis in my head: “We are all hackers now”, and again, again and again I notice it getting confirmed. The latest confirmation comes from The Institute for the Future, which…
Flaws of the Smart City is a critical, workshop-tailored kit to explore the dark faces of the so-called Smart Cities. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities embed flaws. This kit aims to fix these weak spots or…
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman Verso Publishers November 2014 Hardback, 464 pages Abstract Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as…
Digital Assurance: Reaching a Seamless Customer Experience by Shawndra Hill (Wharton professor of operations and information management) and Kumudha Sridharan (vice president and global head of testing services at Wipro Technologies) White paper produced by Knowledge@Wharton and sponsored by Wipro…
Julia Angwin, a senior reporter at ProPublica, writes in the New York Times about how it takes a lot of money and time to avoid hackers and data miners. “In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After…
A few weeks back I wrote that Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is running a short series on Savage Minds that features interviews with design researchers, ethnographic hackers, and field work makers with their take on anthropology and design. Besides her…
Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology Program at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (California, USA). She writes about the subjective and scientific stakes in exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War…
In our new dystopian world of pervasive surveillance, most people are at a loss what to do. The tools that allows us to maintain a semblance of privacy are really, really hard to use. Most of us won’t even try…
Smart Citizens Edited by Drew Hemment and Anthony Townsend Future Everything 2013, 96 pages This publication aims to shift the debate on the future of cities towards the central place of citizens, and of decentralised, open urban infrastructures. It provides…
Pew Research Center found that 86 percent of surveyed adult Internet users in the U.S. have made efforts to obscure their “digital footprints†— which could include simple measures like clearing cookies in your browser or something more involved like…
The hyper-connected smart home of the future promises to change the way we live. More efficient energy usage, Internet-connected appliances that communicate with one another and cloud-enhanced home security are just some of the conveniences we’ll enjoy. It’s going to…
As a grad student in anthropology, Gabriella Coleman was warned that studying the culture of computer hackers would make it hard to get a job teaching in a university. She went ahead anyway, becoming one of the first academics to…
Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition, writes HD Guru. While these features give you unprecedented control…
The Washington Post describes the world and the impact of everyday hackers who use social networks, do-it-yourself-then-show-it-off Web sites, cheap parts from China, and blissfully simple microprocessors to modify or invent new electronic products for their houses, cars, offices and…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, is working on a book on the end of cyberspace – which he thinks will come as the internet moves off desktops and screens and becomes embedded in things,…
Further on my earlier theme of “we are all hackers now“, here is a long feature on user-generated devices by Fumitada Takahashi and Phil Keys in the Nikkei Electronics Asia magazine (Japan). “User-Generated Devices (UGD), allowing people to enjoy themselves…
Scientific American magazine (SciAm) devotes the whole September issue to privacy in an age of rapidly developing technology. Privacy in an age of terabytes and terror Introduction to SciAm’s issue on Privacy. Our jittery state since 9/11, coupled with the…