Category Culture
One in five Britons don’t know how to use e-mail
The Times comments on a report on the significant digital divide in the UK, despite widepsread broadband and mobile coverage. One in five adult Britons is unable to open a word processing document on a computer, and just under 20…
Cultures of virtual worlds
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…
Consumerisation: the blurring of business and consumer focused applications
Knowledge@Wharton has published an article on the blurring boundary between consumer and corporate technologies. Apple CEO Steve Jobs says the iPhone’s latest software tweaks due in June will make the device more palatable to corporate America. Oracle on March 11…
Videos online of Share Festival 2008 conferences
All videos of the conferences at the Bruce Sterling curated Share Festival that recently took place in Turin, Italy, are now online. Aside from Bruce Sterling, exhilarating discussants were Massimo Banzi, Julian Bleecker, Donald Norman and Marcos Novak, to name…
Cellphones save the world
Daniel Lende wrote a good annotated summary of the New York Times magazine feature of Jan Chipchase, on the “Neuroanthropology” blog. He thinks the “world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change…
The Economist website features Jan Chipchase video
The Economist asked Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages. The video is part of The Economist special report on mobility and “digital nomads”. Watch video
The future of Europe lies in email
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…
Economist special report on mobility
The Economist newspaper has published a special report on mobility, wondering what the social effects will be. Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog). Our nomadic future…
Last three CHI 2008 interviews
Luca Chittaro (blog) of Il Sole 24 Ore’s Novà just published his last three CHI 2008 interviews: Talking cars A collaboration between Toyota and Stanford University is experimenting a talking car interface that does much more than navigation, providing safety…
Interview with Peter Coughlan, Transformation Practice Lead at IDEO
Henning Fischer of Adaptive Path recently had an email conversation with Peter Coughlan, Partner and Transformation Practice Lead at IDEO. They discussed IDEO’s transformation practice and his team’s processes to create a more human-centered design. Read interview
Another batch of CHI 2008 interviews
Luca Chittaro (blog), who covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, continues with his gruelling pace of interviews. Here is another batch: Technology among the homeless We…
Monday’s interviews at CHI 2008
Luca Chittaro (blog), who covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, continues his hectic schedule of interviews: It’s all about the (digital) money Interview with Scott Mainwaring…
Better than free
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, has written a long post about making sense of value in a world in which many digital goods are available for free. “The internet is a copy machine. At its most…
New David Report bulletin about consumer culture
The latest David Report bulletin, called “I shop therefore I am”, looks into the world of consumer culture from different point of views; ethical, social, political, economical and humanistic. Shopping has turned into a lifestyle. We consume as leisure and…
Interviews at the CHI 2008 conference
Luca Chittaro (blog), a professor at the University of Udine, covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper. He is already at the pre-conference workshops where he is…
A conversation with Dopplr’s Matt Jones
Matt Jones used to be director of user-experience design at Nokia. Now he is the co-founder of Dopplr, a social networking site for frequent travellers. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path recently had a long conversation with him that you can…
The rise of the emotional robot
Paul Marks examines in the New Scientist how far people are prepared to go in accepting robots as social partners. “Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University…
Microsoft Research and the future of human computer interaction
“By 2020 the terms ‘interface’ and ‘user’ will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans,” is the first sentence of a short article on the BBC News site. According to the BBC, “it is one of the predictions…
Milan to host 2015 Expo
It’s all over the Italian press (the winners) and the Turkish press (the losers), and on a small number of international news outlets: Milan will host the 2015 Universal Exposition (a.k.a. “Expo” or “World Fair”). In a day and age…