Experientia

Experientia

The human factor in service design

McKinsey’s John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea write that businesses ought to focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale. “Some organizations are making strides in the design…

Interactions 12: Day Two

Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor continue their coverage of the Interactions conference in Dublin. In this long article, they report on the presentations by Jonas Löwgren (School of Arts & Communication at Malmö University), Scott Nazarian (frog), Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org),…

Interactions 12: Day One

Dublin – and even its Lord Mayor – welcomed a record 750 attendees to the opening of Interaction 12. The day would unfold with Hitchcock, healthcare, and hearing the question :what if?”. Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor report on the…

The ethnography of robots

Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact…

Does corporate ethnography suck?

In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia: “Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that…

The psychology of persuasion

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea…

Affective computing

Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design…