Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
My hometown Turin (or “Torino” in Italian) has been selected as the 2008 World Design Capital by ICSID, the international council of societies of industrial design. With this nomination, Turin has been given the go-ahead to organise a series of…
The UK Design Council launched today Design of the time (DOTT, in short), a £50 million, ten-year initiative to re-design the UK that begins in North East England in 2007. DOTT, which is lead by John Thackara, gives the UK…
Chris Luebkeman, director for global foresight and innovation at the innovative top engineering firm Arup, talks in a series of short videos about foresight and innovation. “Foresight is not crystal-ball gazing, it is not about predicting trends. Instead, foresight helps…
Fast Company and Richard Florida’s team just published a small report on up-and-coming hubs for creative workers–places that draw people who are talented, tech savvy and tolerant. Ten of them are in the United States, another five elsewhere in…
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western…
In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is finalising a contract to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to map real-time traffic conditions statewide on all 5,500 miles of major…
The Isreali Design Center, Israel’s first museum dedicated to design will open in Holon by 2008. A series of conferences exploring the role of design in society and raising awareness for the forthcoming museum have been planned. The first conference,…
In re-reading an article on the future of Wi-Fi from last week’s Herald Tribune, I was struck by a comment towards the end: “What doesn’t work is the complexity to get onto a Wi-Fi network. The ability to make wireless…
(After two posts about car companies, this is refreshing) Hundreds of towns and cities across Europe begin a week of events designed to persuade people to choose forms of transport other than cars. More than 900 towns and cities in…
In a blog that talks about participatory design and how users can contribute to the design of services, we cannot sidestep the ethical issue. Often people’s creativity and cultural contributions are used against their own interests. In a long and…
Glocalmap.to (site currently in Italian only) is a large-scale cultural “social tagging” project that integrates web mapping, thematic tagging and mobile phone messaging, to create a new urban narrative for the city of Turin. It allows citizens and visitors alike…
The Fused Space design competition was inspired by the question: can artists and designers do a better job than the marketing industry in creating new application for ITC in public space? The 300+ entries satisfied juror John Thackara that…
Axel Soojung-Kim Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future and lead blogger of the Institute’s Future Now website sent me some thoughts on how the isolated, autonomous science city has now been displaced by the model of…
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…
India’s approach seems quite similar to that of the West — lay out some semi-official ground rules, then encourage (but not require) builders to meet them. China’s approach, conversely, seems to be more revolutionary than evolutionary — build sustainable cities…
Rambling in the countryside has never been so popular, but a conference this weekend, hosted by the Living Streets charity, will examine how taking a daily stroll down the High Street can breathe new life into towns. Read full story
Internationally renowned designer, sustainability architect and author of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, argued at the TEDGlobal (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford, UK, that we can only think of our future cities if we think about what our…
Jyri Engeström posted a long and interesting blog entry about cities, technology and creativity. “[…] During the course of the last decade, computers have become the most important platform for remixing culture. It is likely that computer-based creativity will flourish…
Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ”change the world.” Convinced that it will ”produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,” he is…