At the heart of the Design Council’s framework for innovation, which helps designers and non-designers across the globe tackle some of the most complex social, economic and environmental problems, is its design methodology, the Double Diamond – a clear, comprehensive and visual description of the design process. Launched in 2004, the Double Diamond has become […]

Spotify’s product designer Mady Torres de Souza and senior user researchers Olga Hörding and Sohit Karol explain how they developed their personas tool, how they use it today and why it’s so useful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify. Here at Spotify, we often ask ourselves who we’re designing for. And since listening to […]

The user experience of most web-based applications begins well below the interface, all the way down to fields in a database. Examining how systems and users experience time prove this point dramatically. Think about how messy time can be—time zones, leap years, recurring events. As the creators of educational technology, our team learned the hard […]

Consumer insights into the circular economy Report of stakeholder meeting, 25 October 2018, 14 pages The “Stakeholder Meeting: Consumer Insights into the Circular Economy” in Brussels on 25 October 2018, was co-organised by the Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption (CSCP) with the support of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), as part of the […]

The Journal of Business Anthropology is an Open Access journal which publishes the results of anthropological research in business organizations and business situations of all kinds. The theme of the latest issue – Vol 7, No 2 (2018) – is design anthropology: Design Anthropology: An Introduction to the Themed Issue Christine Miller and Emilie Hitch […]

Stuart Candy (@futuryst), an award-winning foresight practitioner, Director of CMU Situation Lab and Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, recently wrote a short intro to Experiential Futures (XF) for designers interested in transition-oriented practice. He adds: “XF is a big topic, so other approaches and formats have their place – a plain-language one-pager […]

Changing Things: The Future of Objects in a Digital World by Johan Redström and Heather Wiltse Bloomsbury Publishing September 2018, 192 pages In their new book, “Changing Things: The Future of Objects in a Digital World”, assistant professor Heather Wiltse and professor Johan Redström explore what the networked, digital products of our time actually do […]

A few days ago Experientia attended the Service Design Days in Barcelona. One of the surprise presentations was by Anna Pohlmeyer, who co-directs the Delft Institute for Positive Design. Although the title seemed a bit airy and ephemeral, the talk was anything but. Anna’s approach was solid and well grounded in research. She showed how […]

We have unwittingly accepted the paradigm that technology comes first, with people relegated to doing the actions that the machines cannot do, writes Don Norman. This requires people to act like machines, ever ready to take over when things go wrong. As a result, we require people to do tedious, repetitive tasks, to be alert […]

Putting people at the centre when designing and delivering buildings of the future is crucial to unlocking the potential of new technologies, according to the third installment of Buildings of the Future paper (pdf) released by Aurecon, an Australasian engineering and infrastructure advisory company. Aurecon undertook interviews with a broad group of professionals across the […]

I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy By Cris Beam Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2018 272 pages Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as pundits argue over whether we should bother empathizing with our […]