Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The Washington Post reports on how homeless people in Washington DC use mobile phone, blogs and e-mail to stay on top of things. “Today, it’s not unusual for the homeless to whip out Nokia 6085 GoPhones (with optional Bluetooth and…
Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change by Lisa Campbell Free download As San Francisco braces itself to be the first major American city to not have a daily newspaper, the canary has sung as the death of print looks eminent.…
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 
Julian Bleecker of Nokia calls it a “short essay”, but “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction” is really a 97 page book. “Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things…
Over the last few months, Franco Papeschi and Tory Dunn of the Vodafone User Experience team have been doing work on a set of principles and guidelines to support the formation of ethical / sustainable social enterprise services. They were…
“What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?” A new book, edited by François Jégou and…
Consulting firm McKinsey has just launched a new website, called What Matters, that is an extensive collection of essays and interviews with opinion formers around the world. The content is categorized into ten big topics: Biotechnology, Climate Change, Credit Crisis,…
The Independent today introduced SustainIT, the first in a series of three monthly supplements on ICT and globalisation. Some of the articles in the supplement (especially those not written by sponsor BT staff) are a treat: Corporate social responsibility is…
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…
danah boyd, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just joined Microsoft Research New England. On 29 February, she gave her first talk at Microsoft since joining the company. This talk, entitled “Social Media is…
One of those things hard to achieve with conferences is a good atmosphere. The recent LIFT conference in Geneva, Switzerland clearly has it down to a science: logistics were so well taken care of that you hardly noticed them (the…
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: This device we make in our own image changes everything Renowned computational biologist and educational innovator James Bower believes the Internet, rather than representing some new stage in human development, has simply caught up…
The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries, including those who are increasingly consuming computing technologies and services, as well as those for whom access to…
The session devoted to Design Thinking was my personal favourite of the entire 2009 LIFT conference. Beyond the engineers and business’ discourse about the future, what is it designers can propose? What sort of alternatives are they envisioning? What’s the…
More and more content of Interactions Magazine is becoming available online. The latest March-April issue is devoted to trust and “explores the idea of assurance and the feelings of ease or unease related to relationships of confidence or skepticism”. Here…
The business channel of The Atlantic Online published this weekend the first of two articles by Grant McCracken on the implications of the recession on consumer habits. This article just deals with three variations of a mere quantitative change. The…
The Guardian published a special section on the role of mobile phones in emerging markets: Nice talking to you … mobile phone use passes milestone A UN report reveals that half the globe now pays to use one, with the…
The last day of the LIFT conference started off with a session devoted to inspiring stories from people with extraordinary projects and lives. Designer Matt Webb talked about the relationship between science-fiction and design, followed by Joerg Jelden, a trend…
After the project, the collaborative website, the game, now also the booklet. KashKlash is an open forum and web project focusing on alternative economies in a post-money future. What will such a world look like? How will the concept of…
Ethan Zuckerman, a multifaceted thinker whose work focuses on the impact of technology in developing countries, and a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, was interviewed on Ideas Project, the Nokia site…