Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In a thoughtful article in the New York Times, Hal R. Varian, professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley, explores the potential business models that could be built around cheap laptops in developing countries.…
Ray Kurzweill, author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and featured before in this blog (link and link), was recently a guest speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he discussed how our lives might look…
During the recent O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (January 24-26, San Francisco), Roberto Tagliabue, digital experience creative director of Nike TechLab , B.J. Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University and author of the book “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What…
Swisscom’s Vision 2015 highlights the most probable future with respect to developments and usage of ICT. Taking into consideration both technological and societal trends, Swisscom developed a number of storylines covering different aspects of the every-day life in order to…
Plenty of people seem to be blogging at the 2006 LIFT conference, taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, today and tomorrow. Just this check this overview. Bruno Giussani is my personal favourite, because of his capability to condense the talks in…
I just looked in amazement at an astonishingly realistic 3D animation of a military robot patrolling the (real) streets of Johannesburg, South Africa. The effect of reality is so overwhelming that most people will accept this footage as a fact.…
We can either stumble into the future and just hope it turns out all right or we can try and shape it. A government thinktank charged with considering the future of UK transport in the next 50 years, just released…
Given the opportunity to start a new media empire from scratch, what would be the ideal approach? Four high-ranking media executives who were in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum last week, shared their visions with Thomas Crampton of…
Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be attending the meanwhile sold out LIFT conference next week. If some of the Putting People First readers are going to Geneva as well, do seek him out. Aside from his role in Experientia, Jan-Christoph…
“Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it’s about everything,” writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, “Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic.” Sterling offers…
The future may lie in devices that care for an aging population, used to living on their own and with money to spend. Often the needs of an older population are at odds with the design of new gadgets. According…
Nokia’s Charlie Schick shares with us his hopes and fears on the future of mobile. He is probably right on all of them. (via Rudy De Waele)
Vodafone has just published the 14th issue of Receiver, its online magazine on the future of communications technologies. The current edition is devoted to applicability issues in mobile services: how can we work, learn, cooperate and know better using mobiles?…
The British educational thinktank NESTA Futurelab argues that the logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system. This is, according to them, the essence of personalisation,…
With too few young workers supporting an ageing population, somebody—or something—needs to fill the gap, especially since many of Japan’s young people will be needed in science, business and other creative or knowledge-intensive jobs. Many workers from low-wage countries are…
Books are being scanned to make them searchable on the Internet. Television broadcasts are being recorded and archived for online posterity. Radio shows, too, are getting their digital conversion — to podcasts. All these new resources have vast potential to…
The Net’s basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. We simply can’t keep patching the Internet’s security holes. While researchers are working to make the Internet smarter, experts like Google’s Vinton Cerf warn that this could…
Last week John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception and author of In the bubble: designing in a complex world, lectured at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) on Solidarity economics and design: life…
In this French language article (sent to me by Régine Debatty), two specialists in hotel hospitality discuss the impact of new technologies on their sector, and the delay the hospitality sector is facing in providing services (such as WiFi) that…
From information design to experience design: smart artefacts and the disappearing computer The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and determine our lives. This notion of…