Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents. Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience…
Over the last week, I have been helping out Marcia Caines with editing her thoughtful review of the Saint-Etienne design biennial (She helped me out before on editing my piece on the Turin design policy conference). Take a look, it…
Jonathan Follett, president and CEO of Hot Knife Design, Inc., a Boston based UX and web collaborative, shares his thoughts on the hybrid experience of interacting with on-line data in the physical world, through the mobile geospatial web. The article…
Kazys Varnelis, director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, has written a very nice essay for Vodafone’s receiver magazine that explores how mediated communication has changed our notion of place, created non-places and now has us darting between simultaneous environments.…
The September edition of the American architecture magazine ArchiTech contains a special section on experience design. The section, which sees experience design as “a new way of thinking, designing, engaging that uses media and architecture to produce immersive spaces”, is…
The first LIFT Asia 08 are online. My favourites: Mobiles and the urban poor – Bruce Sterling Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT Asia, about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies to access services like payment, was…
The Adaptive City is the title of an excellent essay by Dan Hill on recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and most of all the changing…
Nicolas Nova and Bruno Giussani have been blogging two of the LIFT Asia conference sessions that took place in Seoul today. Session: Networked city The new digital layers provided by ICTs are transforming contemporary urban environments. What does that mean…
Russell Davies is concerned that “we’ll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites.” “Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various…
The PICNIC conference website has posted a short but intriguing interview with Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s new head of design direction. An excerpt about the urban experience, technology and solitude: “You know, I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They’re…
New mapping technologies are fundamentally changing the way we experience the city. Urban planners Varnelis and Meisterlin explore the busy intersections of design and cartography in a long and excellent essay on Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank. “Today’s intelligent maps…
On Wednesday 2 July Nicolas Nova (LIFT lab) moderated a session at the World Congress of Architecture in Turin, Italy, entitled “From ubiquitous technology to human context – Technology applied to architecture and design: does it solve problems or create…
The Christian Science Monitor published an interesting article that voices scepticism on whether the planned carbon-neutral city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi could indeed become a sustainable urban innovation model globally: “The project has done little to impress green city…
The Economist asked Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages. The video is part of The Economist special report on mobility and “digital nomads”. Watch video
The Economist newspaper has published a special report on mobility, wondering what the social effects will be. Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog). Our nomadic future…
It’s all over the Italian press (the winners) and the Turkish press (the losers), and on a small number of international news outlets: Milan will host the 2015 Universal Exposition (a.k.a. “Expo” or “World Fair”). In a day and age…
Newsweek’s Katie Paul interviews Richard Florida to find out how new ‘creative classes’ are changing cities around the world and what our chosen cities say about us. Here is the introduction: Is it just a cultural quirk that the New…
The UK government is aiming to make the country a global leader in the arts, media and advertising through initiatives including the creation of thousands of new apprenticeships and the launch of a Davos-style world creative business conference. Prime Minister…
Today Torino World Design Capital published an interview Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken recently conducted with Bruce Sterling. This time not about spimes, ubiquitous computing or digital fabrication, but about his experience with the city where he lived for the last…
Dan Hill, former head of interactive technology and design at the BBC and currently director of web and broadcast at Monocle, has published a long article on the street of the future. Here is his introduction: “I was recently asked…