Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
As societies face increasingly complex problems, design is emerging as the tool to solve some of Asia’s biggest issues. Through field trips with designers skilled in human-centered design, the team behind Ethnographers’ Field Guide to Innovation, a new series on…
Last month Putting People First announced the upcoming conference on design & sustainable innovation for smart cities in Nice France. Meanwhile we are pleased to announce the full event agenda (see below). This event will feature professionals from leading research…
Billions spent on cyber security tech while human error ignored, writes Misha Glenny in the Financial Times. Armies of zombie computers threaten us all. Despite the headlines, the cyber security industry has prioritised the development of expensive tech over teaching…
Invitation to the International Conference on Design & Sustainable Innovation for SmartCities Nice (France) 8 December 2016 On the 8th December 2016, the CITYOPT project will host an international conference on Design and sustainable innovation for SmartCities, at the Centre…
The Adaptive Reuse Toolkit – How Cities Can Turn their Industrial Legacy 
into Infrastructure for Innovation and Growth by Matteo Robiglio Policy Paper, September 2016 The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) All over in the world, industrial…
Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman Current (Penguin Randomhouse), July 2016 256 pages Abstract Why did the New York Stock Exchange suspend trading without warning on July 8, 2015? Why did certain Toyota vehicles accelerate uncontrollably…
Can behavioral change address local energy issues, raise peopleâ’s awareness energy consumption issues, and directly support non-profit organizations at the same time? With the Nice pilot of the CITYOPT project, we have seen strong suggestions that it can. It also…
Infrastructure providers are used to focusing on issues of project selection, funding, and regulation. The most successful firms are learning to provide great consumer experiences too. “The consumer experience matters. Infrastructure providers therefore need to tap into the disciplines and…
The limits of our imagination: design fiction as a strategy for engaging with dystopian futures By Joshua Tanenbaum, Marcel Pufal and Karen Tanenbaum (UC Irvine Published in: LIMITS ’16 Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits June 2016,…
The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University has started talking about ‘Transition Design.’ In his long reflection about this new kind of design practice, Cameron Tonkinwise, CMU’s Director of Design and Doctoral Studies, writes: Transition refers to phased change…
As cities experience a demographic shift, the need for age-friendly design is becoming ever more critical. From almshouses to driverless cars, the future of urban housing and mobility may just be shaped for and by the elderly. Freelance journalist Alice…
Every year, the Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) Public Private Partnership (PPP) publishes the EeB PPP project review – a round-up of energy-efficiency projects that have been co-funded by two European Commission schemes. This year, the print and digital booklet design was…
In this post we highlight a number of Interaction 16 conference videos especially relevant to the Putting People First readers. They are grouped thematically. Algorithm-inspired design Crowds, algorithms and computations: The new materials of design – Matthew Milan, Normative [54:21]…
In a Medium essay that we missed during the Christmas break, Dr Dan Lockton asks how we can invert design for behaviour change and apply it from below, enabling people to understand, act within, and change the behaviour of the…
In this long essay, published in MIT’s brand new Journal of Design and Science, Kevin Slavin argues that designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are, he says, hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from…
Understanding User Motivations and Drawbacks Related to Product Repair By Nazli Terzioglu, Dan Lockton, Clare Brass (Royal College of Arts) Conference Paper, Sustainable innovation 2015 The Centre for Sustainable Design, London This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study…
Anthropologist Michael Thompson believes in the power of creativity from below in solving some of the smaller and bigger problems of our time. “People generally are very creative and innovative. Many anthropological case studies have shown that. If development happens,…
The radical Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, known for his pioneering social housing projects in Latin America, has been named as the winner of the 2016 Pritzker prize, the highest accolade in architecture. The 48-year-old, who is also the curator of…
Sebastian Berger, Assistant Professor of Organization at the University of Bern, writes in the Scientific American how the default option, a simple change based on psychology, will increase use of renewable energy. In a recent paper, Berger together with Felix…
Joel Achenbach reports in the Washington Post on how digital dissenters say human needs are getting lost in the digital revolution and start to fight the tech establishment. Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles…