Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The latest publication of the UK think tank Demos looks at the future of social networks and the civil implications they are bringing about: Humans are social animals, spinning intricate webs of relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbours and enemies. These…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has written a long reflection on tinkering as a way of knowing following a recent conference on the same topic. It is highly recommended reading: “You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch…
Ulla-Maaria Engeström (Mutanen) of Social Objects, maker of entertaining & educating services such as Thinglink, a free product code for creative work, argues that renting is a much more sustainable concept for luxury than owning: “The idea of luxury typically…
Hubert Guillaud has written again a short analysis on why it makes no sense at all for companies to create something like intelligent fridges. His main argument is that nobody has any need for such a device. Although the article…
Kazys Varnelis, director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, has written a very nice essay for Vodafone’s receiver magazine that explores how mediated communication has changed our notion of place, created non-places and now has us darting between simultaneous environments.…
The New York Times reports on a nine-person team at Microsoft Research India that assesses whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it. “A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India […] approaches the…
Yesterday Genevieve Bell, a highly respected anthropologist and Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group, gave a lecture at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. One of the university’s doctoral student reports: Bell used an ethnographic lens to examine…
Teemu Arina, who will speak at the upcoming Mobile Monday event in Amsterdam, has put a lengthy essay on his blog on the topic “how mobile is changing our society.” “I have a feeling that the question we pose today…
The current edition of Vodafone Receiver Magazine is devoted to location and geowebbing, or as they write: “annotating real space digitally and using the world itself as our interface”. Two authors have already contributed on the theme, and more articles…
Jeff Parks of Boxes and Arrows just posted a lot of material from the recent IDEA Conference (Chicago, 7-9 October), including a 41 slide presentation (pdf) by Aradhana Goel, the service design strategist at IDEO: When we look through the…
Carphone Warehouse, the British mobile phone retail chain, in conjunction with the London School of Economics, has released its fifth Mobile Life report, a comprehensive study into the technology usage habits of children and adults in the UK and US.…
Mobile Revolutions is a great blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell, that I discovered via Mobile Active. What’s more, she has actually taken the time to write a lengthy, seriously researched and in-depth paper to…
The first LIFT Asia 08 are online. My favourites: Mobiles and the urban poor – Bruce Sterling Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT Asia, about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies to access services like payment, was…
Experientia’s senior partner Jan-Christoph Zoels was this week at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam, and has been providing regular reports. Here is his third one, covering the Thursday afternoon sessions: Making Love is Eskil Steenberg (Quel Solaar)’s take on a…
Is there a point in the evolution of mass market mobile phones that cellular connectivity as we understand it today is perceived not as a core feature, but as an optional extra? Jan Chipchase of Nokia explores convergence, connectivity and…
David Jennings, author of the book Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll, argues why he disagrees with Cass Sunstein on the future described in his book Republic.com 2.0, one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us…
On Sept. 22, 2008, Microsoft Research New England conducted an inaugural symposium in Cambridge, Mass., hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to open an extensive collaboration with leading research institutions in the region. The symposium included introductions to Microsoft…
I enjoyed this funny little article by Jasper van Kuijk on extremely persuasive software: We humans were not designed to work behind a computer all day. In fact we were not designed to be in the office all day. We…
Experientia’s senior partner Jan-Christoph Zoels is this week at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam and is sending regular updates. Here is his second one, covering the Thursday morning sessions: Group actions just got easier! – Clay Shirky jump-started the second…