BUG+IDEO blog
IDEO just announced a quick open user interface exploration project with Bug Labs, that will run for a little over a week on a new public blog BUG+IDEO. An open project between BugLabs and IDEO, this deep-dive exploration of the…
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Category Americas
Top kitchen toy? The cellphone
According to the New York Times’ Julia Moskin, the cellphone has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans. “It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes,…
Palm provides a case study in user experience strategy
Very nice and in-depth review by Marek Pawlowski: Palm, which launched a new flagship device and platform earlier this month, is a company staring at the very real possibility of extinction. The pioneering user experience of its PDAs has long…
Taken Out of Context: American teen sociality in networked publics
danah boyd is a a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley) and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She just published her dissertation entitled “Taken Out…
IBM research on the use of social software in the workplace
Both Penny Edwards (Headshift) and Bill Ives (Fast Forward) report on recent IBM research on social software in the marketplace: To what extent does your company facilitate social networking between employees split by geographical or organisational distance, or with (existing…
Book: Elsewhere, U.S.A.
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives…
People-centred design in times of frugality
What are the profound socio-cultural changes currently taking place and are people-centred designers well equipped to help companies and institutions address this new context? The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre…
“Transformation” a better concept than “innovation” to guide us forward
At the beginning of last year, we at Experientia worked with a Belgian regional authority on developing the concept for a new design centre, called the Transformation Factory (read more about it in this paper). Now also Business Week’s Bruce…
The dark side of “The Cloud”
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live…
The 168-hour work week
A Pew/Internet survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture…
Grounding the American Dream
Context-Based Research Group and Carton Donofrio Partners have conducted a joint study on the future of consumerism in a changing economy and conclude that a new “grounded consumer” is emerging from the ashes of the economic meltdown. Press release Context-Based…
New institute to explore how world’s poor use technology to spend, store and save money
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries. The…
Whitepaper: The glittering allure of the mobile society
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is available as a whitepaper. “When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it…
The Situated Technologies project
A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents. Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience…
Interview with Microsoft UX designer Ruth Kikin-Gil
Ruth Kikin-Gil is the UX Design Lead at Microsoft’s Office Labs, a Microsoft innovation group which focuses on the future of productivity and information work, and an alumnus of the acclaimed Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. In this 20-minute audio interview,…
Book: Grown Up Digital
McGraw-Hill is pitching me books and now and then I request a copy because the subject matter interests me greatly. Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World” is such a book. It explains how…
Nearly half of technology users need help with new devices
Report published on three-year digital youth research project
A three-year research project that explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives has just published its report. “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a collaborative project funded by the…
Taking a page from design firms
The Wall Street Journal reports on how businesses are tapping designers for innovative ideas on management. “When New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center wanted to make the chemotherapy process easier on patients three years ago, it sought help from an…
Everyday Digital Money workshop at UC Irvine
The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money. The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural,…