Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The March issue of Metropolis is focused on products with the theme of Good Design. Several articles are fitting quite well with the topic of this blog: What is good design? By Peter Hall The 20th-century definition of “good design 
Jamie Owen, a visual information specialist for a training arm of the USA Department of Veterans Affairs argues on Boxes and Arrows that thinking outside of our own cultural influences can strengthen our design decisions. “The role of the information…
Jukka Jouhki (blog), an anthropologist and post-doc researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has a particular interest in technology. He is currently doing research on South Korean new media culture (2006-2009), human-technology…
Kazys Varnelis [CV | blog], the author of Networked Publics and the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is writing a new book and posting drafts online. “My current…
Rohan Gunatillake of NESTA Connect highlights three principal drivers as being behind the new wave of online activity: the low barriers to participation, the thirst for conversation and the power of collaboration. “Let’s look in turn at the general lesson…
The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money. The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural,…
Somebody else’s phone is a new Nokia campaign advertised in London that does a great job of depicting the life of an early to mid twenty year-old through their text messages, MMS and pictures. (via Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino)
Mobile Revolutions is a great blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell, that I discovered via Mobile Active. What’s more, she has actually taken the time to write a lengthy, seriously researched and in-depth paper to…
The Restaurant of the Future at the University of Wageningen investigates the influences on eating behaviour and carries out studies for the food industry. Ceiling cameras record not only what food you selected, but what you almost selected and how…
The latest issue of the International Journal of Design is devoted to the cultural aspects of interaction design: “When a group of people, no matter its scale, start sharing common ways of thinking, feeling and living, culture emerges. Culture therefore…
Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Hardcover) by Tom Boellstorff Princeton University Press Hardcover, 2008, 328 pages Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second…
Today we made a little survey of the languages spoken at our office and we came to a quite remarkable seventeen: Arabic, Armenian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Kashmiri, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Urdu. This…
MobileActive reports on two studies that explore how low-income people use mobile technology in Brazil and South Africa. This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called ‘base-of-the-pyramid’ users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile…
The second article in Vodafone’s newly updated Receiver Magazine is about China and the next billion customers. Author Jared Braiterman seeks to understand mobile phones play in China’s fast-paced development and explores why China become a centre of passionate technology…
A few weeks ago we were contacted by Marco Bevolo of Philips Design who was looking for some advance feedback on the book he is writing together with co-authors Stefano Marzano (also Philips Design), Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz and Alex…
Here is my selection on product design related papers presented at CHI 2008. (Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.) Case study: using online communities to drive commercial product development [abstract] Authors: Sheena Lewis (IBM) Abstract: This paper…
Rick Poynor, a writer and critic based in London specializing in visual culture, wrote a provocative essay (published in I.D. Magazine), tackling contemporary indulgence with design thinking and innovation: Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no…
A two-day conference this week will bring together scholars, developers and participants in virtual worlds to discuss the emerging cultures being created from a range of online communities. Event organizers theorize that virtual worlds can be studied by researchers in…
Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations (see also these posts), argues in a short essay that the future of Europe lies in email: “The EU is the test case for the…
The UK government is aiming to make the country a global leader in the arts, media and advertising through initiatives including the creation of thousands of new apprenticeships and the launch of a Davos-style world creative business conference. Prime Minister…