Cities & Infrastructure
We are an international experience design consultancy helping companies and organisations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first.
Vaccine hesitancy is a top10 global health threat. Dealing with it successfully requires understanding it as a behaviour and generating a holistic view of people’s perspectives & ecosystems. This way we can identify the best opportunities for intervention. Here is Experientia’s position on vaccine hesitancy and our tailor-made support for the vaccine industry.
100&Change is a MacArthur Foundation competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that will make measurable progress toward solving a significant problem. 100&Change will select a bold proposal that promises real progress toward solving a critical problem of our time. And it will award a $100 million grant to help make […]
Then we are interested in hearing from you. We have several positions available for talented UX/UI and service designers who are passionate about creating world-class user experiences. Please see the job descriptions on our website for more information, and send us your CV with a cover letter statement about yourself, your experience, and what UX […]
Experientia is proud to have been a key participant at the Roche Innovation Summit, held at Roche headquarters in Basel Switzerland on 19 June 2018. Themed “Transforming the Healthcare Experience Together”, the summit aimed to galvanize the Roche community around the future transformation of healthcare and diagnostics. With 800 attendees from Roche and Genentech global […]
Hai una startup? Hai mai pensato ai benefici che potrebbe trarre dal Design Thinking? Questa è l’opportunità per scoprirlo! DesAlps Workshop #2: Il Design Thinking per la tua startup! Giovedì 28 giugno 2018 – dalle 9:30 alle 17:00 @ I3P | Corso Castelfidardo 30/a, Torino —– Nell’ambito del progetto europeo DesAlps, un team di esperti […]
How do we make smart cities civic?
Engagement Lab, an applied research and design lab associated with Emerson College that investigates and creates media and technology to reduce disparities in civic participation, announced via a twitter thread the launch of Making a Smart City Civic, an open toolkit to ensure smart cities serve all of us. We reproduce the thread here: From […]
[Book] Challenging the City Scale
Challenging The City Scale: Journeys in People-Centred Design Ed. by Cité du Design (Saint-Etienne) and Clear Village (London) Birkhäuser, 2018, 176 pages (free ebook) This 176 pages book is released by the famous international publisher Birkhäuser, and co-edited by Cité du design Saint-Etienne and Clear Village London, with the contributions of all the partners and […]
Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto
Jim Balsillie, former chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion, doesn’t mince his words in discussing the new Google-affiliated waterfront development Sidewalk Toronto: What happens with Toronto’s waterfront infrastructure will have profound and permanent impacts on the digital rights and prosperity of all Canadians because IP and data – our century’s most valuable extractive resources […]
[Report] Reclaiming the Smart City
Reclaiming the Smart City: Personal Data, Trust and the New Commons Why and how city governments are taking a more responsible approach to the collection and use of personal data By Theo Bass, Emma Sutherland, and Tom Symons Monday, 23 July 2018 Nesta UK [pdf download] This report is about why and how city governments […]
Human-centered building design
Putting people at the centre when designing and delivering buildings of the future is crucial to unlocking the potential of new technologies, according to the third installment of Buildings of the Future paper (pdf) released by Aurecon, an Australasian engineering and infrastructure advisory company. Aurecon undertook interviews with a broad group of professionals across the […]
[Study] Rethinking The Smart City – Democratizing Urban Technology
Rethinking The Smart City – Democratizing Urban Technology By Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office January 2018 Download pdf: English version – German version Following the celebration of the “creative city” (as described by Richard Florida), the “smart city” has become the new flavor of the month—and a brand. It […]
[Book] Driverless Cars: On A Road to Nowhere
Driverless Cars: On A Road to Nowhere Christian Wolmar London Publishing Partnership Jan 2018, 136 pages Driverless cars are the future. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. Almost daily there are media stories about how we will soon all be able to rip up […]
Learning from today’s car-centric cities for a human-centered future of mobility
The introduction of autonomy into urban environments creates a unique opportunity to do things differently. This, writes Maya Pindeus (CEO and co-Founder of Humanising Autonomy) requires us to encourage a human-centered perspective towards urban mobility and to step away from traditional urban planning models. 2050 does outline a promising future but also creates the danger […]
Developing human interactions with autonomous systems
Two excellent Medium articles by the people of Humanising Autonomy, a London based startup that works towards a vision of intuitive interactions between autonomous systems and people: Child-Friendly Autonomous Vehicles: Designing Autonomy with all road users in mind November 14, 2017 – written by Leslie Nooteboom, COO and Co-Founder of Humanising Autonomy To make sure […]
[Book] Making Cities Smarter
Making Cities Smarter – Designing Interactive Urban Applications by Martin Tomitsch Jovis Publishers March 2018, 208 pages Abstract More than half of the world’s population is now living in cities, and this number is predicted to rise. This means that more people than ever before will share the same urban infrastructure, and city governments around […]
Don’t miss Experientia at Torino Design of the City
Torino Design of the City is nearly here! Experientia will of course be part of this exciting week (10-16 October) of events, meetings, workshops, exhibitions and guided tours about design, and we warmly invite you to join us. The event is organised by the City of Turin and will take place in strategic city locations […]
Boston’s human-centered research to design middle-income housing
In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is conducting ethnographic, human-centered research to design middle-income housing that reflects people’s lived experiences, reports the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This includes intensive planning sessions in which residents, designers, and policy experts co-create policy blueprints. As part of these efforts, Boston set up a roadshow with […]
Where’s Wally? In Search of Citizen Perspectives on the Smart City
Where’s Wally? In Search of Citizen Perspectives on the Smart City by Vanessa Thomas, Ding Wang and Louise Mullagh of the HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training of Lancaster University and Nick Dunn of ImaginationLancaster Sustainability 2016, 8, 207 Open access – free download This paper builds upon an earlier conference publication by the authors, offering […]
Flaws of the Smart City – A design friction kit
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 to exploit them to set chaos. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities […]
The Adaptive Reuse Toolkit
The Adaptive Reuse Toolkit – How Cities Can Turn their Industrial Legacy into Infrastructure for Innovation and Growth by Matteo Robiglio Policy Paper, September 2016 The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) All over in the world, industrial infrastructure is being creatively re-purposed. Culture, leisure, sport, research, education,design, services, production, residences, and even […]
Remember the people: The foundation for success in 21st C infrastructure
Infrastructure providers are used to focusing on issues of project selection, funding, and regulation. The most successful firms are learning to provide great consumer experiences too. “The consumer experience matters. Infrastructure providers therefore need to tap into the disciplines and insights of great consumer-service companies, such as movie studios, retailers, and tech companies. We can […]
How city design is adapting to older populations
As cities experience a demographic shift, the need for age-friendly design is becoming ever more critical. From almshouses to driverless cars, the future of urban housing and mobility may just be shaped for and by the elderly. Freelance journalist Alice Grahame writes about this trend in a Guardian essay supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Interestingly, […]
On the need for ethnography in user experience design
Michael Thomas of Ford Motor Company argues in a thoughtful personal piece that User Experience design is greatly enhanced by establishing classical ethnographic methods as foundational for defining the domain of design intervention. How can UX account for subjective, positively regarded experiences that are time and community dependent, he asks: Examples of these might include […]
A selection of Interaction 16 videos
In this post we highlight a number of Interaction 16 conference videos especially relevant to the Putting People First readers. They are grouped thematically. Algorithm-inspired design Crowds, algorithms and computations: The new materials of design – Matthew Milan, Normative [54:21] Can computers design? – Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto University [57:38] The Dawn of Agentive Technology: The […]
Creating age-friendly cities
In a new report the McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute (MHFI) argues that we need a new thinking about how to create “age-friendly cities.” Adapting to the challenges of an aging urban population, they write, requires a fundamental change in the mindset of policymakers and innovators about who’s actually living in these cities and what […]