Seeing other people
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives, but how much say will users have in what they do with social networking and what it looks like? This is the central question in an article by Jesse Ashlock…
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Socio-cultural change
IBM research on the use of social software in the workplace
Both Penny Edwards (Headshift) and Bill Ives (Fast Forward) report on recent IBM research on social software in the marketplace: To what extent does your company facilitate social networking between employees split by geographical or organisational distance, or with (existing…
Don’t trust anyone under 30?
I find articles with titles like this difficult to digest. What if you are under 30? And especially if the article is filled with banalities – partly put in the mouth of the “authority” of professor Mark Bauerlein –…
Book: Elsewhere, U.S.A.
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives…
Smart homes haven’t caught on
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been…
Nokia’s IdeasProject
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich with content.…
M-banking and economic development
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in the December issue of the…
“Transformation” a better concept than “innovation” to guide us forward
At the beginning of last year, we at Experientia worked with a Belgian regional authority on developing the concept for a new design centre, called the Transformation Factory (read more about it in this paper). Now also Business Week’s Bruce…
Watch the video – Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives
Last week, the World Bank’s CGAP hosted a roundtable and webinar on the important topic of how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better (see also this blog…
The dark side of “The Cloud”
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live…
New institute to explore how world’s poor use technology to spend, store and save money
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries. The…
Bruce Sterling’s brixels
Bruce Sterling looked at the KashKlash questionnaire results and condensed it all into four narrative future scenarios. An excerpt from the last one: But then his son — who had gone into “cloud design,†God help him — started referring…
Whitepaper: The glittering allure of the mobile society
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is available as a whitepaper. “When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it…
The Situated Technologies project
A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents. Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience…
Johannesburg conference showcases African bottom-up innovation in mobile phone use
If you are interested in bottom-up innovation within emerging markets using mobile phones, the recent MobileActive08 conference (more here) in Johannesburg, South Africa generated a wealth of materials. Below are some videos: Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera Safdar…
The many futures of our digital lives
We all live in a digital world, although it means different things to different people. In her inaugural public lecture as Adelaide’s Thinker in Residence, Intel’s Genevieve Bell will explore how digital technology is shaping our lives, our culture, and…
Book: Grown Up Digital
McGraw-Hill is pitching me books and now and then I request a copy because the subject matter interests me greatly. Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World” is such a book. It explains how…
You’re leaving a digital trail. What about privacy?
The New York Times reports on the privacy issues of our digital communication habits: “A vast sea of digital information [is] being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office…
Social media in closed societies
Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher on the impact of information technology in developing nations, reports on his blog on a recent panel discussion, organised by the Open Society Institute, on new media in authoritarian societies. The discussion started from the premise…
Book review: Born Digital
Some months ago I announced the publication of the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. The book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center,…