[Book] Co-Cities
A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services.
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Challenges
[Book] Cloudmoney
In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash.
Book is also available in German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese & Korean
[Book] The Human Side of Innovation
PepsiCo’s award-winning chief design officer reveals the secret to creating life-changing innovations: putting human needs at the center of any design process.
Ethnographic research in data centers
Data centers are destroying the natural world, writes anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate in Wired. But is the cloud an inherently unsustainable paradigm? He foresees three possible pathways for remaking the cloud into something more sustainable for future generations.
No amount of hype and starry-eyed Metaverse proselytising can escape reality
The metaverse will be a digital graveyard if we let new technologies distract us from today’s problems
Climate change and human behaviour
This Focus of Nature Magazine, a collaboration between Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Climate Change, features a broad range of Review and Opinion content on the role of human behaviour in adaption to climate change and mitigation of its negative consequences.
Human-Centered Design: what architects can learn from UX designers
Approaching architectural design with a UX designer’s mindset ensures a more holistic approach to designing the experience of using a building. From the outset, a stronger understanding of the user enables human behavior to dictate the design to a greater degree.
[Book] Service Design for Urban Commons
This book explores the application of service design to urban commons, focusing on the Reggio Emilia Ducal Palace in Italy.
Why paying individual people for their health data is a bad idea
Paying individual people for their health data will widen inequalities and reduce altruism, luring people to sell their privacy. Health data should instead be treated as collective property, and commercial profits should be shared with the public.
Perspectives on the value of ethnography in a future-focused world
In an uncertain world, the safe bet to futures is to explore, identify and invest in what will most likely not change.
“Democracy depends on it”: Carissa Véliz on privacy and ending data surveillance
“There is nothing shocking or radical about ending an economic practice that has too many negative externalities. We have banned certain kinds of economic activity in the past because of them being too toxic for society. ”
Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare.
How touchless user interfaces can amplify the user experience
A touchless UI has an edge over devices that require touch interactions because decreasing physical contact is helpful in diverse contexts—from food-processing plants to an airport’s self-service registration kiosks.
Harvard Business Review discovers design fiction
By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing. This is counterproductive, the authors argue. Instead, they offer an alternative: Design fiction. A design technique that immerses executives and employees deeply in various possible futures, it uses artifacts such as short movies, fictitious newspaper articles and imaginary commercials to generate transformation roadmaps.
Are digital IDs a “digital road to hell”?
A report by researchers at New York University warns that biometric and other digital ID systems that are increasingly linked to large-scale human rights violations, especially in the Global South.
[Book] Everyday Automation
The first book to take an interdisciplinary and international approach to understanding how our everyday lives are being affected by automated decision-making.
Global Happiness and Well-being Policy Report
In the three years since the last Global Happiness and Well-Being Policy Report, governments have faced a cascade of challenges to the well-being of their populations.
[Book] Expand: Stretching the Future By Design
From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe.
Privacy is a collective concern
It’s easy to assume that because some data is “personal”, protecting it is a private matter. But privacy is both a personal and a collective affair, because data is rarely used on an individual basis, writes Carissa Véliz in the New Statesman.
Internet users are ‘poisoning’ their personal data in the fight against online surveillance
With 'obfuscation' or 'data poisoning,' they are redoubling their efforts to prevent companies from tracking them online, writes Aurélien Defer in Le Monde. But these time-consuming and sometimes very complex methods of resistance have not become widespread.