Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
An interesting study of commuters in Boston and San Francisco found people are more willing to ride the bus or train when they have tools to manage their commutes effectively. The study asked 18 people to surrender their cars for…
The European Union’s Working Party on Data Protection has issued five recommended requirements for the protection of personal privacy in a time of Smart Meters in the home (pdf), outlining what needs to happen in order to gain the benefits…
Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space Edited by Mark Shepard Paperback, 200 pages, 2011 MIT Press in copublication with the Architectural League of New York (Amazon link) Abstract Our cities are “smart” and getting smarter…
LiveMint.com, the Indian online partner publication of the Wall Street Journal, reports on India’s first Design!publiC conclave “on design thinking and the challenge of government innovation,” which took place in New Delhi on 18 March. The event — which was…
Last week Experientia participated in Ecobuild 2011 (London, UK) to showcase its work in user-centred sustainable design for the built environment, and in particular its experience of Low2No, a major low-to-no carbon impact development in Helsinki Harbour, Finland. The Low2No…
Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken will be heading to his home country of Belgium in March 2011, to chair the SEE conference on integrating design into regional and national policies. The SEE project has been running since 2008, and has involved…
The European Commission unveiled an ambitious agenda to bring public services online across Europe so that it could “serve an economy which relies on the networks of the future.” By 2015, the Commission wants to have 50% of European Citizens…
Sarah Drummond, one half of Scotland based dynamic duo Snook, presents a case study about the implications and challenges of using Service Design for Social Innovation in the community of Wyndford, UK. Watch video (via InfoDesign)
The Megacities on the Move report says authorities must start planning their transport infrastructure now for a future when two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. The Forum for the Future report devotes a lot of attention…
Allison Arieff writes in the New York Times Opinionator blog extensively on how citizens harness technology to offer up solutions to problems in their communities. “What if there were a way to transform complaints into something positive and productive? What…
Governments around the world must continue to embrace social media and other new technologies because besides empowering citizens new technologies bring in a “myriad of benefits” for the public sector as well, argues Kelly Dempski of Accenture Technology Labs on…
David Wigder, Vice President of Business Development at RecycleBank, explores on Marketing Green the rise of the peer-to-peer green economy, and in particular the three emerging peer-to-peer models that can facilitate greener transactions: “Online models challenge the notion of permanent…
A group of young designers are making their mark on Nicosia’s urban scene by creatively redesigning “misused public spacesâ€. “Our goal is to give solutions on how these spaces could be used,†said designer Marina Hadjilouca, one of the founders…
The essays featured here stem from talks given at the Focusing on the User Experience session of this year’s Reference Renaissance conference, a biennial gathering of reference and user services librarians put on by the BCR consortium in Colorado. The…
Italian social researcher Chiara Camponeschi has written a fascinating Creative-Commons licensed publication, The Enabling City: Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday (pdf), an innovative toolkit – also featured on a website – that showcases pioneering initiatives in…
Libraries will have to build a new foundation if they are to recover from these economic hard times—a foundation of valuable services, of user experience, not just free content, writes Aaron Schmidt in Library Journal. “We need to stop focusing…
The 2010 Finnish National Innovation Strategy contains an important section on demand and user-driven innovation, with user-driven innovation being described as: “User-driven innovation makes use of information on customers, user communities and customer companies. It engages users as active participants…
In America and Britain governments hope that a partnership with “social entrepreneurs†can solve some of society’s most intractable problem. The Economist reports in a long article. “Social innovation†is the increasingly common shorthand for this approach to public-private partnerships.…
The conventional public services delivery model does not address underlying problems that lead many to rely on public services and thus carries the seeds of its own demise, argue David Boyle, Anna Coote, Chris Sherwood and Julia Slay in a…
I very much enjoyed the reflection of Lee Bryant (Headshift), following the launch of the UK Government’s Big Society initiative. In it, he argues that in the past, UK politics [and not just UK, I’d say] were dominated by two…