Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, has published a 45-page discussion paper on how transforming healthcare to involve the public, i.e. the creation of people-powered public services, can save money and save lives. The National…
Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase has posted an in-depth presentation and paper on designing mobile money services for emerging markets: “Hang around a telecoms industry conference long enough and you start to get big-number fatigue – as one stack of…
The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when…
Email, texting and Facebook let us hide behind our computer screens instead of talking to each other. Elizabeth Day asks in The Observer if we have the tyranny of technology to blame or ourselves? According to John Freeman, who…
Nokia Life Tools was designed to help improve the livelihood and lives of farmers, students and many people in more remote and rural areas in emerging market countries. It does this by offering easily accessible and up-to-date crop prices, education…
On Friday 13 (!) November, Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be one of the speakers at Visualizar’09, an international seminar on public data visualisation, organised by Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain. The conference and workshop will be led by Ben Cerveny…
MIT News reports on how MIT students are exploring innovative cellphone uses in the developing world. “Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the…
Chris Dannen writes in Fast Company that Augmented Reality is overblown, and doesn’t expect apps like Layar to drastically change the way we live our everyday lives. “Talk to the people doing AR research, and they seem to think that…
“As products become more interactive, the focus shifts to the psychological,” argues Gentry Underwood, who focuses on social media and collaborative software at IDEO, in a guest article for Core77. “And with the networking of devices together, we see yet…
Italy is in the process of switching to digital TV, and the implementation is pretty much a disaster, as far as I can tell from the reactions in the region where I live (Piedmont). Many of the problems are technological,…
The November-December edition of Interactions Magazine is online and some articles are available without subscription. Unfortunately, the main menu page doesn’t say which articles are publicly available (although without images) and which aren’t (what about ‘affordances’ in web design?), so…
Experientia partner Michele Visciola, who is also the president of Experientia, has written an article entitled “People-centered innovation or culture evolution?” that got published in the November-December edition of Interactions magazine. Here is the abstract: “The biological theory of evolution…
On 6 November Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be speaking at the IxD Fall Summit 2009 organised by the Umeå Institute of Design. Other speakers are German Leon (Vodafone User Experience, Germany), David Rose (Vitality, USA), Karsten Schmidt (PostSpectacular, UK),…
Last week, the IASDR 2009 conference (International Association of Societies of Design Research) took place in Seoul, South Korea, and all videos of the keynote speeches are already available. Donald A. Norman: Science and Design I start with three contradictory…
Computerworld New Zealand introduces user-centred web design. Introducing user-centred web design The first article in this series introduces the idea of User-Centred Design (UCD) — a design process that concentrates on designing websites for the people who will use them;…
Irene Cassarino, an Experientia collaborator, reports on the First European Conference on Energy Efficiency and Behaviour, which took place in Maastricht last week: What role do objects play in our life and culture? It depends on their embedded scripts. Like…
The boys at design consultancy BERG are prolific this week: Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like by Tom Armitage “There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it’s about what material explorations look like when performed with…
Peggy Orenstein forced herself offline, and reflects in the New York Times Magazine whether this is the path to true knowledge: “Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to…
Yadin Dudai writes in the New Scientist on two books on memory and forgetting in the digital age — Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, and Delete: The virtue of forgetting…
As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. CNN reports. “Microsoft…