Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her three-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s…
The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms…
Digital Anthropology Edited by Heather A. Horst, Daniel Miller Berg Publishers, Oct 2012 328pp Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture.…
In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the same way, form tribes. Of course, we’re pretty far removed from our natural habitat these days. But…
From our cities, to our farms, to our rubbish, humans have firmly stamped their mark across the planet. Humanity’s impact on the globe is so great and varied that we have launched a new geological time period in the Earth’s…
This past week featured a worldwide experiment conducted via a mobile app: The Human Face of Big Data. On September 26, 2012, Against All Odds Productions launched a smartphone and tablet app. With it, users could map their daily footprint…
Heather Kelly reports on the CNN website on The Atlantic’s recent Big Science Summit in San Jose, California: We have voice-controlled assistants on our phones, telepresence robots for when we can’t make it to a meeting in person, and self-driving…
On October 22nd, 2012, Philips Design organized a special seminar and workshop to explore how businesses can innovate by translating ‘Big Data’ into value for people. The internet is becoming ever more intertwined with our daily lives, even more so…
NEXT Service Design is the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin. It focuses on design methods including design thinking, user-centric design and interaction design. Two videos are currently online. Strategy is a…
The last ten years has seen a burgeoning of the Slow Movement in all aspects of life from management, travel and education to science and work. On 4 October, the RSA brought together a group of thinkers and practitioners at…
Prof Manuel Castells is regarded as one of the most-cited sociologists in the world. When most of us were still struggling to connect our modems in the 1990s, the Spanish academic was documenting the rise of the network society and…
Meta Products Meaningful Design For Our Connected World by Wimer Hazenberg and Menno Huisman BIS Publishers, 160 pages 2012 Meta Products discusses the rise of the Internet of Things, a twenty-first century phenomenon in which physical consumer products (meta products)…
By encouraging more focused collaboration among multiple functional groups (notably marketing and sales, operations, engineering/R&D, and procurement), these leaders are combining deep insights about customers [particularly in developing markets], competitors, and supply bases to strip out costs and amplify what…
The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world? A challenge that Bruce Sterling describes as “‘experience design’ problems”. Alexis G. Madrigal explores it in The Atlantic: “If…
Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice by July E. Cohen Yale University Press, 2012 352 pages Free pdf version | Amazon link The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of…
In order to understand mobile phone usage at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in Kenya, iHub Research and Research Solutions Africa conducted a 6-month study, funded by infoDev (World Bank). A total of 796 face-to-face interviews were conducted along…
For the Stanford-educated founders of Emprego Ligado, creating a successful app in Brazil required dismantling every assumption about the target audience. Emprego Ligado, which translates to “connected job,” launched in Sao Paulo this summer with the aim of connecting unskilled…
A few days before the EPIC conference in Savannah, Chicago’s IIT Institute of Design organised and hosted its yearly Design Research conference. Although no videos seem to be available yet, Ciara Taylor provides a concise report on two of the…
Through the application of analytics to Big Data, as well as ethnography — the design and implementation of qualitative field studies to observe cultural patterns — Xerox is answering important questions about traffic congestion, our reaction to it, and how…
The Qualitative Report website contains a very hard to find but highly recommended page on smartphone ethnography apps (or, as they call it, “Mobile and Cloud Qualitative Research Apps”). Some highlights: myServiceFellow Mobile ethnography for (tourism-specific) service design via customer…