- Co-creation, Design (general), HCD / UXD, Participation, Public services, Service design, Socio-cultural change, Sustainability, UserResearch
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Sustainability
Design for social justice
Design Council publishes thirty “Design Cards”
The Design Council knowledge cards summarise a unique resource of online in-depth information compiled by expert authors on design topics and issues that matter. The 30 cards in a pack provide an overview of our knowledge experts resources introducing each…
The future of UK transport in the next 50 years
We can either stumble into the future and just hope it turns out all right or we can try and shape it. A government thinktank charged with considering the future of UK transport in the next 50 years, just released…
“Shaping Things” by Bruce Sterling
“Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it’s about everything,” writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, “Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic.” Sterling offers…
Creative rural industries
What are the key design tasks facing the new post-agricultural rural economies and settlements? A conference in the UK in September will map out a new role for the arts and design in response to new social, environmental and…
Recent Design Council publications
This morning I interviewed Richard Eisermann, Director of Design & Innovation at the UK Design Council, and you will read more about that soon. He pointed me to a number of interesting Design Council publications. They are all available for…
The internet is broken [MIT Technology Review]
The Net’s basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. We simply can’t keep patching the Internet’s security holes. While researchers are working to make the Internet smarter, experts like Google’s Vinton Cerf warn that this could…
John Thackara lecture on solidarity economics & design: life after consumerism
Last week John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception and author of In the bubble: designing in a complex world, lectured at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) on Solidarity economics and design: life…
Persuasive technology for human well-being
Can computers help fight obesity? Can technology motivate you to waste less energy? Can communication devices help overcome racial prejudice? Can a virtual agent persuade you to break your smoking habit? Can a mobile phone help you study? Can a…
Building in green [Newsweek]
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…
Philips field testing in the favelas of Brazil
Voices in Your Hand is a humanitarian project, sponsored by Philips Electronics, to create a simple, voice-email handset and cheap audio services to help urban shantytowns and isolated rural areas in the developing world, overcoming illiteracy or minority languages. The…
Ezio Manzini on design, social innovation and sustainability
Ezio Manzini, who is a professor at the Milan Polytechnic and one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, recently talked about his ideas at the British Design Council. A background paper entitled Enabling solutions, social innovation and design…
RED: design and socio-economic innovation at the Design Council
RED is a unit at the (British) Design Council that wants to challenge accepted thinking on current social and economic problems by exploring new solutions through innovative design practice. The unit takes a proactive approach to solving problems and developing…
Driverless bus straight to your door [The Times]
London dwellers will be able to summon driverless buses to their front doors and be taken direct to their destinations.
Simona Maschi on scenarios and service design
CPH127 just posted a video interview with my former colleague Simona Maschi from Interaction-Ivrea.
1000 European cities take aim at car use [BBC]
(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…
Green petite cars tempt tourists in southern Spain [BBC]
The narrow, cobbled streets of Cordoba in southern Spain are no place for a car, but Alfredo Romeo, a Spanish entrepreneur wanted to change that and set up a business with “blobjectsâ€, electric hire cars that are proving popular with…
Design for learning [CNN]
To prepare students for an evolving information-based society, architects are designing innovative schools to support new models of teaching and learning. Read full story (Related story: Students at Roy Lee Walker Elementary School don’t just study textbooks to learn about…
What to expect from the next five decades? [RSA Journal]
The forthcoming 2005 State of the Future report will outline what it considers to be the 15 greatest challenges facing humanity. Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project, gives us a preview and a glimpse of some of the changes…
What does a sustainable society look like?
The Pattern Map offers a visual guide to the sustainability patterns that provide a framework for developing a Conservation Economy: an ecologically restorative, socially just and reliably prosperous society. The fifty-seven patterns are adaptable to local ecosystems and cultures, yet…