Behavioral sciences
We are an international experience design consultancy helping companies and organisations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first.
Vaccine hesitancy is a top10 global health threat. Dealing with it successfully requires understanding it as a behaviour and generating a holistic view of people’s perspectives & ecosystems. This way we can identify the best opportunities for intervention. Here is Experientia’s position on vaccine hesitancy and our tailor-made support for the vaccine industry.
100&Change is a MacArthur Foundation competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that will make measurable progress toward solving a significant problem. 100&Change will select a bold proposal that promises real progress toward solving a critical problem of our time. And it will award a $100 million grant to help make […]
Then we are interested in hearing from you. We have several positions available for talented UX/UI and service designers who are passionate about creating world-class user experiences. Please see the job descriptions on our website for more information, and send us your CV with a cover letter statement about yourself, your experience, and what UX […]
Experientia is proud to have been a key participant at the Roche Innovation Summit, held at Roche headquarters in Basel Switzerland on 19 June 2018. Themed “Transforming the Healthcare Experience Together”, the summit aimed to galvanize the Roche community around the future transformation of healthcare and diagnostics. With 800 attendees from Roche and Genentech global […]
Hai una startup? Hai mai pensato ai benefici che potrebbe trarre dal Design Thinking? Questa è l’opportunità per scoprirlo! DesAlps Workshop #2: Il Design Thinking per la tua startup! Giovedì 28 giugno 2018 – dalle 9:30 alle 17:00 @ I3P | Corso Castelfidardo 30/a, Torino —– Nell’ambito del progetto europeo DesAlps, un team di esperti […]
The anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence
The algorithms that underlie much of the modern world have grown so complex that we always can’t predict what they’ll do. Iyad Rahwan, who directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, proposes a radical idea: the best way to understand them is to observe their behavior in […]
[Book] The Costs of Connection
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias Stanford University Press August 2019, 352 pages Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to “connect” through digital means. But this convenience is not free―it is purchased with vast […]
Research findings send automated sentiment analysis to the trash bin
The age of social media has opened up exciting opportunities for researchers to investigate people’s emotional states on a massive scale. For example, one study found that tweets contain more positive emotional words in the morning, which was interpreted as showing that most people are in a better mood at that time of day. The […]
Consumer behaviour and the circular economy
Report: Behavioural Study on Consumers’ Engagement in the Circular Economy London Economics for the European Commission – Consumers Health and Food Executive Agency (CHAFEA) 23 October 2018, 202 pages The objective of this study was to provide policy-relevant insights on consumers’ engagement in the circular economy. The study involved several research tasks including a literature […]
How SAP’s SuccessFactors used anthropology to understand its customers
As part of a new approach to user interfaces, Amy Wilson, Head of Product at SAP SuccessFactors, pulled designers together with behavioral scientists with backgrounds in cultural anthropology. The goal was to help the designers better understand the way most individuals intuitively work. This way, even while high-design was still a priority, the designers could […]
Uninformed consent
Leslie K. John, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, is specialized in the psychology of privacy decisions. In this excellent cover story for the Harvard Business Review, she analyzes why people are so bad at making decisions about their private data (“They misunderstand both costs and benefits. Moreover, natural human biases, interfere with their […]
Tech companies use “persuasive design” to get us hooked. Psychologists say it’s unethical.
Behind the screens of the games we play and digital communities we interact with are psychologists and other behavioral science experts, who are hired to create products that we want to use more and more. Big tech now employs mental health experts to use persuasive technology, a new field of research that looks at how […]
Game Your Brain: The neurological impact of UX
The world is experiencing a merging of media and minds that we haven’t yet created a vocabulary for. We know that user experience design has the power to respond to what algorithms deem “suitable” to us, but have we understood that this changes the way our brains work in symbiosis with our machines? What if […]
Experientia and Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo announce innovative partnership
Wide ranging partnership also covers collaboration with design schools and public events on service design “Finding the way forward for independent design means building new business models for service design consultancies in the age of the company buy-out.” Michele Visciola, President, Experientia PRESS RELEASE It seems the business world is finally realising that service and […]
Experientia is hiring! Service design intern
Service Design Intern: Lausanne, Switzerland and Turin, Italy Experientia, an international experience design consultancy, is looking for service design interns for our Turin, Italy office, to support research, concept development and design. The ideal candidate will be a holistic thinker and designer, with a systems approach to enable complex service offerings, driven by an understanding […]
Nudges that fail
Nudges that fail Cass R. Sunstein Behavioural Public Policy, 2017, 1(1), 4-25. doi:10.1017/bpp.2016.3 Why are some nudges ineffective, or at least less effective than choice architects hope and expect? Focusing primarily on default rules, this essay emphasizes two reasons for this. The first involves strong antecedent preferences on the part of choosers. The second involves […]
Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize is a win for good design
by Erin O’Loughlin Richard Thaler’s 2017 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday was met with more buzz around the offices of our design agency than is usual for economics news. What people outside of the industry probably don’t realize is that service designers don’t think of Richard Thaler as an economist — instead, we consider him one of […]
To improve people’s health, listen to social scientists
With an ageing population, a rise in long-term conditions, growing health inequalities and a lack of political will to ensure that funding is increased in line with demand, the UK’s National Health Service has been brought to breaking point. In this context, there is an urgent need to put in place policies that reduce healthcare […]
First issue of Behavioural Public Policy now available for free online
Behavioural Public Policy is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and its relevance to public policy. The study of human behaviour has recently taken on growing importance within many disciplinary specialties and in recent years the findings from this field have begun to be applied to policy concerns in a substantive […]
A cultural approach to wearables (and the design opportunities it provides)
In January of this year, Sakari Tamminen and Elisabet Holmgren of the Finnish/USA innovation agency Gemic, published a paper on EPIC entitled “The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical“. A wide range of new digital products lumped together under the category of ‘Wearables’ or ‘Wearable Technology’ raises fundamental questions about the […]
How Silicon Valley is (ab)using behavioral science and nudging
In an extensive review of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, the book by Michael Lewis on the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Tamsin Shaw provides a deeper criticism of the field of behavioral economics. He claims that behavioral science can be used quite deliberately for the purposes of deception and […]
Service design at the Singapore Government
Jacqueline Poh, CEO of Singapore’s GovTech agency, spoke about the importance of a service design approach at the Innovation by Design Conference 2017, held from 7-8 March as part of Singapore Design Week. Whether or not the public thinks that a policy, process or service has been designed with empathy, and with the user’s needs […]
[Book chapter] Behavioral economics and health
Behavioral Economics and Health Judd B. Kessler and C. Yiwei Zhang Oxford Textbook of Global Public Health 2014 Behavioral Economics combines the insights of Economics and Psychology to identify how individuals deviate from the standard assumptions of economic theory and to build systematic deviations into improved models of human behavior. These models allow researchers to […]
[Report] Consuming Differently, Consuming Sustainably: Behavioural Insights for Policymaking
The objective of this report, published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is to shed light on opportunities to strengthen the effectiveness of policies for sustainable consumption in both developed and developing countries. The publication provides evidence-based insights from behavioural science, detailing five key behavioural barriers to sustainable consumption. It also includes concrete examples […]
[Report] Behavioural Insights at the United Nations – Achieving Agenda 2030
In 2016, the UNDP Innovation Facility collaborated with the newly engaged UN Behavioural Science Advisor to work on behaviorally-informed design with 8 UNDP Country Offices in all 5 regions: Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Ecuador, Jordan, Moldova, Montenegro and Papua New Guinea. This Progress Report highlights the potential of behavioural insights to help achieve the Sustainable Development […]