Trapped in the Anglosphere
Martin Kettle thinks the UK has lost sight of next door Europe, trapped as Brits are in their Anglo-centric internet. “It is hard to recall a time when the national, not just the London, mind was less informed about…
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Culture
Finland’s user-driven innovation policy
The 2010 Finnish National Innovation Strategy contains an important section on demand and user-driven innovation, with user-driven innovation being described as: “User-driven innovation makes use of information on customers, user communities and customer companies. It engages users as active participants…
Does technology pose a threat to our private life?
This week Google’s Eric Schmidt suggested we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life? Jemima Kiss reports…
Designing for the loss of control
The people at frogdesign have posted two long articles (the first one is really an essay) that we consider a recommended read: Openness or how do you design for the loss of control? Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in…
Creating immersive experiences with diegetic interfaces
Imon Deshmukh of Cooper thinks that interfaces can be more closely integrated with the environment in which they operate. In an article on the Cooper blog, he shares some of what he heas learned from the universe of video games…
Do you own your device, or it you?
On August 12, at noon, ZDNet Australia organised a live broadcast on the future of email. The discussion delved into the issues and challenges facing email in its current state, and looked at how social media is changing the way…
If technology is making us stupid, it’s not technology’s fault
There has been growing concern that computers have failed to live up to the promise of improving learning for school kids. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and PBS have all done stories recently calling into question the benefits…
Clay Shirky’s digital populism
In this review of the book Over the holidays, I read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and found it quite wanting. In an excellent review of the book, researcher and author Evgeny…
Finding happiness while spending less
Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the New York Times on what will make us happy. “The practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier.…
Information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students
Emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students show that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups. The…
The Internet Generation prefers the real world
They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. Der Spiegel…
Design for social change and the museum
From April 12 through April 14, 2010, 22 designers, historians, curators, educators and journalists met at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, in Italy, to discuss the museum’s role in the 21st century in relation to design for social…
Mobile youth activism around the world
A couple of years ago I wrote about Mobile Revolutions, a blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell Salazar. The blog also supported TakingITMobile, an international study on youth mobile communications that she completed as a…
Reputation managers addressing our internet footprints
In the modern digital age where seemingly everything and everyone is online, a new industry is emerging to “manage” the internet footprint that people and businesses leave online. “Reputation managers” can clean up and shape a person’s online history: burying…
Genevieve Bell’s Digital Futures report released
In 2009, Dr. Genevieve Bell, an Australian-born anthropologist and ethnographer, who is an Intel Fellow and heads Intel’s newly created Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) division, was selected as South Australia’s Thinker in Residence. In her assignment, she focused on…
Rem Koolhaas, the Hermitage and the design of innovative experiences
On the way to celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2014, the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (formerly the Winter Palace of the Russian czars) hired legendary architect Rem Koolhaas to modernize the art museum experience for visitors in a way…
The web means the end of forgetting
Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, reports in The…
The unintended consequences of Facebook
Facebook is about to celebrate its 500-millionth user, but the social media application has had wide consequences, even for those who have never signed on, writes the BBC. Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of…
Coercing people into a brave new digital world
Design consultant Martyn Perks thinks that a UK government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online “threatens to make cyber slaves of us all.” “Is it not possible that some people simply don’t want to participate in this…
Social networking and public service provision
I very much enjoyed the reflection of Lee Bryant (Headshift), following the launch of the UK Government’s Big Society initiative. In it, he argues that in the past, UK politics [and not just UK, I’d say] were dominated by two…