How Philips found new spark [Business Week]
CEO Gerard Kleisterlee tells how an emphasis on smart design pushes innovation, makes happy customers — and boosts the bottom line. Read full interview (via Brian Regienczuk)
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Experientia
What does a sustainable society look like?
The Pattern Map offers a visual guide to the sustainability patterns that provide a framework for developing a Conservation Economy: an ecologically restorative, socially just and reliably prosperous society. The fifty-seven patterns are adaptable to local ecosystems and cultures, yet…
When cell phones become oracles [Wired News]
Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you’re going to do next. At least, these are the capabilities of 100…
London exhibition of designer hearing aids [BBC]
The UK’s largest charity for deaf people and a design magazine are launching an exhibition of futuristic hearing aids to make them more popular. The show, called Hearwear, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London this week. Read…
Mobile phones boom in Tanzania [BBC]
The enormous growth of mobile phones in Tanzania is helping to close the digital divide between Africa and the West. Mobile phones seem to have created a new sector of the economy, and some now wonder if the emphasis on…
Single gadget weaves phone, internet and media services [International Herald Tribune]
France Télécom this month offered up its latest version of convergence by tacking on a few useful services to its Livebox home networking product, a “triple play” service combining Internet, telephone and television service. The most interesting of the new…
Harvard articles on the user-centred approach
Harvard Business School Publishing has some articles available as (paying) downloads describing how experience design and the user-centred approach can lead to innovation. Let the Users Take the Lead – May 15, 2005 Interview with Eric von Hippel, the head…
Residences for the elderly that feel just like home [Newsweek]
It seems so obvious: let people age the way they have lived. Today, finally, it’s beginning to happen. From upscale residences in California to family-size nursing homes in Mississippi, living facilities for the elderly are undergoing an architectural and cultural…
Proctor & Gamble targeting teens with clever blogs [Fast Company]
On a blog called sparklebodyspray.com, the pastel geometric images of four faceless girls emphasize the four authors, code-named Vanilla, Tropical, Rose, and Peach. Vanilla and her crew aren’t people at all. They’re the names of four perfume sprays, targeted to…
‘Zero waste’ is Seattle’s new garbage mantra [Seattle Post Intelligencer]
Moving beyond recycling to preventing garbage itself as the next generation of social and civic responsibility, Seattle Public Utilities is launching an initiative called Wasteless in Seattle. With the long-term goal of “zero waste,” the city hopes to drastically reduce…
Don Norman on the pitfalls of human-centred design
Human-centred design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose…
“thoughtless acts?”: observations on intuitive design
thoughtless acts? is a book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO that invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them. These “thoughtless acts” reveal how people how people behave in a…
The world is round [New York Review of Books]
The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx’s vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx’s view of globalisation lives on, and nowhere…
Designing customer experience with Kyle Coolbroth [Small Business Branding]
Somehow I attributed the first experience design podcast to the Experience Journal (see post). In fact, the honour goes to Small Business Branding. But they both interviewed the same person, Kyle Coolbroth. “On today’s show, my guest is Kyle Coolbroth,…
From “System Design” to “Experience Design” [Philips]
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips (see previous post) also pointed me to the ambient experience info on Philips Medical. “Imagine if you could break down the barriers that can make a visit to the hospital…
Design’s new school of thought [Business Week]
IDEO’s David Kelley is building a “D-school” that aims to put students in direct contact with the people they’re designing for. An interview on the D-school as a B-school with Bruce Nussbaum. Read full story (via Metacool)
The Financial Times reflecting on foresight
If we believe what we read, not only the South China tiger and the Cross River gorilla but the Japanese and Italians are heading for extinction. Doomsday projections make good headlines – we offer a few here – but the…
The future of shopping [Philips Design]
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips, commented on some of my previous Philips posts and pointed me to the very informative sites on the “Future of Shopping” (see link below) and “Ambient Intelligence“. The “Future of…
This pen is mighty [International Herald Tribune]
Three French companies, with an assist from the Finns and the Swedes, have combined their ingenuity to come up with a digital pen-and-paper system called PaperPC that, broadly speaking, digitises anything you can write with a pen. What makes it…
Are we losing our innovation religion? [EDN]
You can outsource product design to a third party, which in turn may use big chunks of external intellectual property; you can outsource physical manufacturing; and now, you can even outsource your research and development. […] What’s left? Not to…