How Philips found new spark [Business Week]
CEO Gerard Kleisterlee tells how an emphasis on smart design pushes innovation, makes happy customers — and boosts the bottom line. Read full interview (via Brian Regienczuk)
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Design
London exhibition of designer hearing aids [BBC]
The UK’s largest charity for deaf people and a design magazine are launching an exhibition of futuristic hearing aids to make them more popular. The show, called Hearwear, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London this week. Read…
Single gadget weaves phone, internet and media services [International Herald Tribune]
France Télécom this month offered up its latest version of convergence by tacking on a few useful services to its Livebox home networking product, a “triple play” service combining Internet, telephone and television service. The most interesting of the new…
Harvard articles on the user-centred approach
Harvard Business School Publishing has some articles available as (paying) downloads describing how experience design and the user-centred approach can lead to innovation. Let the Users Take the Lead – May 15, 2005 Interview with Eric von Hippel, the head…
Residences for the elderly that feel just like home [Newsweek]
It seems so obvious: let people age the way they have lived. Today, finally, it’s beginning to happen. From upscale residences in California to family-size nursing homes in Mississippi, living facilities for the elderly are undergoing an architectural and cultural…
Proctor & Gamble targeting teens with clever blogs [Fast Company]
On a blog called sparklebodyspray.com, the pastel geometric images of four faceless girls emphasize the four authors, code-named Vanilla, Tropical, Rose, and Peach. Vanilla and her crew aren’t people at all. They’re the names of four perfume sprays, targeted to…
Don Norman on the pitfalls of human-centred design
Human-centred design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose…
“thoughtless acts?”: observations on intuitive design
thoughtless acts? is a book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO that invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them. These “thoughtless acts” reveal how people how people behave in a…
Designing customer experience with Kyle Coolbroth [Small Business Branding]
Somehow I attributed the first experience design podcast to the Experience Journal (see post). In fact, the honour goes to Small Business Branding. But they both interviewed the same person, Kyle Coolbroth. “On today’s show, my guest is Kyle Coolbroth,…
From “System Design” to “Experience Design” [Philips]
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips (see previous post) also pointed me to the ambient experience info on Philips Medical. “Imagine if you could break down the barriers that can make a visit to the hospital…
Design’s new school of thought [Business Week]
IDEO’s David Kelley is building a “D-school” that aims to put students in direct contact with the people they’re designing for. An interview on the D-school as a B-school with Bruce Nussbaum. Read full story (via Metacool)
The future of shopping [Philips Design]
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips, commented on some of my previous Philips posts and pointed me to the very informative sites on the “Future of Shopping” (see link below) and “Ambient Intelligence“. The “Future of…
This pen is mighty [International Herald Tribune]
Three French companies, with an assist from the Finns and the Swedes, have combined their ingenuity to come up with a digital pen-and-paper system called PaperPC that, broadly speaking, digitises anything you can write with a pen. What makes it…
Experience architecture forum at Harvard
“Experience Architecture†unites narrative content and media technology to offer a dynamic new approach to the built environment. This design orientation focuses on the guest experience, and highlights the potential for architects to integrate media, information, and other forms of…
AlwaysOn – the insiders network
The most powerful thought leader and business development conference in Silicon Valley has started and AO readers can watch it live on the web. Go to website
Stanford cranks up curriculum for design [News.com]
David Kelley, founder of industrial-design firm IDEO, is making headway in his dream of transforming design departments from that quirky corner where everyone wears clunky shoes to a central part of the product development team. Read full story Listen to…
The first experience design podcast?
This podcast focuses on customer experience design and the impact it has on business. A first for experience design? [Update: it turns out that Kyle Coolbroth has been featured before in a podcast. So this is not the first experience…
Don’t throw the research out with the focus groups [Customer Experience Crossroads]
It’s become popular to disparage focus groups. What people often hear is that research is bad, or people who rely on it are lacking in leadership ability. Most of the people making these disparaging comments about marketing research are also…
Presence? Mark me absent [Microsoft Watch]
With Office Communicator 2005, an IM client for business users, Microsoft is leading the charge to make ‘presence’ ever-present, and not just in instant-messaging. But is presence really progress? Read full story
Context
Context-based Research Group was established in 1999, the goal was simple – to help marketers and product designers do better work through the power of ethnography. Margaret’s Walking Stick is Context’s perpetual anthropology / ethnography education project. Each month contains…