Category Socio-cultural change

More than money

It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through…

Why people adopt or wait for new technology

Jared Spool explores the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters. Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that…

Video chat reshapes domestic rituals

Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat to do things together that would otherwise require a plane ticket. “Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and…

Towards an ethics of persuasion

As design becomes more sophisticated in influencing user behavior, it’s important that we start to think critically about the ethical boundary between persuasion and outright manipulation, argues Stephen P. Anderson. “You can’t discuss a topic like seduction or what motivates…