Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Nicolas Nova has been going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings (the ethnographic praxis in industry conference), and ran across this interesting paper entitled “Ethnography as Design Provocation†by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off by explaining how…
The Economist reports on how virtual worlds are being put to serious real-world uses—and are starting to encounter some real-world problems. “With the popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life and games such as “World of Warcraft” and “Sims…
The EPIC 2007 conference on ethnographic praxis in industry has a blog, and it’s not what you think. The format is that of a newspaper or magazine advice column where readers can ask questions to a specialist. Each week the…
In a Business Week interview design guru Don Norman argues for making autos less automated and for infusing gadgets with natural, easy-to-interpret feedback signals. In his new book, The Design of Future Things (Basic Books), Don Norman isn’t afraid to…
Business Week profiles Anne Kirah, former design anthropologist at Microsoft, and now Dean of the new Danish school called 180°academy, where she is “shaking managers out of their traditional ways of doing things and forcing them, perhaps for the first…
A conversation between the authors Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provides an overview of the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches to designing situated technologies and inhabiting cities populated by them. “The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications…
The current issue of the magazine of Philips Design contains a long article about the company’s design research approach: “Scientists send probes into deep space in an attempt to get a better understanding of the unknown. Philips Design does something…
The TED conference has published its video of the talk by Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase in March this year: Nokia principal researcher Jan Chipchase’s investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of…
Nokia’s latest study, ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’, predicts that within five years a quarter of all entertainment will be created, edited and shared within peer groups rather than coming out of traditional media groups. Trend-setting consumers from 17…
According to Niti Bhan, Nathan Eagle‘s post on the limitations of the current perception of the mobile internet experience for the developing world are “spot on and the most insightful I have come across to date”. Here is a quote…
In an article for UXmatters, Hilary Cooldige of Molecular reviews current research on teen mobile phone us, argues for contextual user research and mobile usability studies in the field, and presents some of the results of her own field studies.…
M3, the Dutch marketing conference, was this year devoted to co-creation. Keynote speakers were Charles Leadbeater (author of We-Think) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture), arguing their “enemy” positions.…
2007 Summer at Kitchen Budapest (Paperback) by Bircsák Eszter, Somlai-Fischer Szabolcs (ed.) Kitchen Budapest (KiBu), opening in June 2007, (see also here) is a brand new media lab for young researchers who are not only interested in the convergence of…
Dott 07 was a year of community design projects in North East England that explored what life in a sustainable region could be like – and how design can help us get there. It is called a manual (rather than…
UXnet, the user experience network, launched its new website this week, with some major improvements. UXnet is a platform organisation that provides tools and resources for the user experience community. It works with a worldwide network of local ambassadors. The…
Tom Davenport (Babson College) has written a Harvard Business column entitled “The Rise of Corporate Anthropology” where he lauds the contribution of anthropology because of its emphasis on observation: “What’s so good about systematic observation? It’s the key to knowing…
Changing the change. Design Visions, Proposals and Tools is an international conference, chaired by Ezio Manzini (blog) of the Politecnico di Milano, on the role and results of design research in the transition towards sustainability. The conference will be held…
Mitchell Ashley, ceo and chief strategist of Converging Network, analyses why there is a growing number of dissatisfied users who’ve tried and given up on Microsoft’s Vista operating system. He concludes that it is “the user experience where many of…
The New York Times reports on how in the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” academic researchers see the resurgence of older patterns of oral communication. “The growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life…
The Urban Atmospheres project (video) is exploring how people who live in cities might want to use technology, how it could help them develop a sense of community or belonging, or play into their emotional experiences of urban living. “By…