Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
There has been a lot of talk about magic lately in critical, cultural and technological spaces; what it does, who it is for, and who are the ones to control or enact it. As a way of unpacking a few…
The Next Nature website sets out to radically shift our notion of nature: Our image of nature as static, balanced and harmonic is naive and up for reconsideration. Where technology and nature are traditionally seen as opposed, they now appear…
In 2009, W Brian Arthur published a remarkable book, The Nature of Technology, in which he formulated a coherent theory of what technology is, how it evolves and how it spurs innovation and industry. Technology, he argued, “builds itself organically…
Making Good our Future: Exploring the New Boundaries of Open & Social Innovation in Manufacturing Policy Paper prepared for the European Commission May 2015, 49 pages As part of the Social Innovation Europe initiative, the European Commission has published a…
This year, the research focus of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) is on Human+Machine Futures, the blurring lines between human and machine, natural and artificial. What happens when technology allows us to automate just about anything? What happens when…
In 2014, Ericsson and UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) entered a three-year partnership with the intention to collaborate around Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and sustainable urbanization. One of the first explorations was driven by the Ericsson User Experience…
People talk about the future of technology in education as though it’s right around the corner, but most of us get to that corner and see it disappearing around the next. This innovation-obsessed cycle continues as we are endlessly dissatisfied…
The stories we tell ourselves about technology – typically, optimistic ones from would-be innovators, pessimistic ones from their critics – are usually too simple. Making them more complex can support a richer discussion about where a technology might be going,…
Anna Bergren Miller provides a short write-up in Shareable on how Joseph Grima and Space Caviar explored changing notions of domesticity at the 2014 Biennale Interieur. “At this year’s Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium, British architect Joseph Grima turned the…
Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that can read 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget…
Billions of dollars are spent on experts who claim they can forecast what’s around the corner, in business, finance and economics. Most of them get it wrong. Now a groundbreaking study has unlocked the secret: it IS possible to predict…
A canvassing of 2,558 experts and technology builders about where we will stand by the year 2025 finds striking patterns in their predictions, reports the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project. In their responses, these experts foresee an ambient information environment…
There are endless choices when it comes to recording and sharing our ideas. Reliable analog tools are converging with innovations in technology to produce new ways of working. So what’s the future of note-taking? In celebration of 150 years of…
Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta (the UK innovation charity), writes that in 2014 the growing movement to take back control of personal data will reach a tipping point. “The next few years will bring a further explosion of data, and…
How will work be organized in the Networked Society? Fundamental changes are taking place. Cultural changes and rapid technological development are changing the rules and opening up for new ways of structuring business and changes in the workplace. Ideas and…
The more our data is used to determine our needs and desires, the less chance there is for serendipity, writes Bronwen Clune. Are we willing to make this concession in the name of progress? “Tracking, data mining and collaborative filtering…
Designing with Data The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and ARUP have released Designing with Data: Shaping Our Future Cities, a new report that explores the massive potential role that data could have in the planning and design of…
Speculative Everything Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming By Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby MIT Press Jan 2014, 200 pages [Amazon link] Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and…
Two new articles on Ethnography Matters: Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology…
The secret to robots with better social skills? Exploiting human nature. Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor of BoingBoing.net, explores “how [designers can make] robots trick you in loving them” for the New York Times Magazine. “In the future, more robots will…