Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Nokia announced today that it unveiled two handsets that offer a range of useful features and colours aimed at consumers in emerging markets. Interestingly they have each been designed based on extensive user research. Nokia 2600 classic for personalisation The…
Stephanie Hanes, a correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, reports on how Namibia’s plucky fix-it industry can handle all manner of disaster with your phone. “Cellphones are in the deepest rural areas in Africa,” says Saadhna Panday, of South Africa’s…
On this University of Washington video broadcast Tapan Parikh describes his experiences developing CAM – a toolkit for mobile phone data collection – in the rural developing world. Designing technologies for an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and capabilities…
All kinds of things apparently, as described by this revealing story on the BBC, commented on by Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week: “Clearly, children love the machine. Most of them had never seen a computer before and the great design…
Newsweek reports on how mobile banking in India saves the government and banks money and reduces fraud that plagues the public-distribution system. Mobile phones are making life better for people in remote, underserved areas of India. They no longer have…
The EPIC 2007 conference on ethnographic praxis in industry has a blog, and it’s not what you think. The format is that of a newspaper or magazine advice column where readers can ask questions to a specialist. Each week the…
Bruno Giussani reports on the press conference announcing the LIFT08 conference programme (backgrounder): The conference LIFT08 will take place for the third time in Geneva, Switzerland, on 6-8 February 2008. The main structure of the programme has been presented tonight…
India is one of the world’s hottest mobile design locations today. The Hindu Business Line reports on what handset makers think of design in India, and how they track trends and make gadgets that reflect people’s personality and needs. The…
The Christian Science Monitor reports on how China’s computermakers tap vast rural market with simple tools and local officials’ support. Lenovo, the world’s third-largest computermaker and China’s best-known global brand, chose China’s northeastern town of Langfang to “launch its assault…
The New York Times reports on how M.I.T. has lately turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the poor” “M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But…
Design for the Other 90%, the much lauded exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York on how design can address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor and marginalised, has been severely criticised by…
Jeannie Choe reports on Core77 how Stanford University’s Design School and School of Medicine teamed up to create Respira, an extremely affordable device for better asthma care. “In order for asthma inhalers to perform effectively, the discharged medicine must be…
Antti Kujala, a design director at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, spearheaded Nokia’s strategy and design development. He spoke to Nandini Lakshman of Business Week in New Delhi about the nuances of designing for emerging markets and about future mobile…
For some time now I have been following the French innovation blog Internet Actu, not realising that it was part of a bigger initiative called “Fing“. Fing stands for “Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération”, or the the next generation internet foundation,…
Nokia’s new design studio in Bangalore, India, will use co-creation and ethnographic approaches to explore new design ideas for mobile phones targeted at the Indian market. InfoWorld reports: The studio in India is one of four satellite studios that Nokia…
In an article in the Dutch language Voka Tribune (Voka is the professional association of companies in Flanders, Belgium), management guru C.K. Prahalad talks about the importance of co-creating experiences, starting from the Build the Bear example. Since the article…
The UK Department for Development has published a long study, written by a number of researchers from British and Australian Universities, about the social and economic benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in low-income communities in Jamaica, India, South…
Like AdSense, which has given Madison Avenue executives the collective jitters, the Open Architecture Network (OAN) suggests that 2.0’s cocktail of collaborative technologies can have an equally radical influence on business and industry practices. In the case of the OAN,…
Tom Shelley reports in Eureka magazine on the latest thinking in how to ensure that products truly fulfill customer needs and aspirations – and succeed in the marketplace. The story is largely based on an interview with Apala Lahiri Chavan,…
BBC News has just published a feature on Jan Chipchase, principal researcher at Nokia Design and frequently featured on this blog. “Jan Chipchase tours the world looking at how people use mobile phones in their everyday lives and, more broadly,…