Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information by Paul Dourish MIT Press, May 2017 264 pages Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical…
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…
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 fertile relationship is growing between anthropology and business. Marketers are finding that anthropologists gather very useful knowledge by studying consumers in their natural habitat using the ethnographic techniques of observation and interviewing. A leader in this field is Bill…
Patrick G. Watson, lecturer in the Sociology department and Social Psychology program at McMaster University, Canada, has recently published a thoughtful review of two business ethnography books: Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities By Jordan, B. Walnut…
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 illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some…
The British consumer cooperative Co-op uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches to make decisions about products. While quantitative research is best when you want to understand the scale of something (such as how many users do X or Y, or…
The latest issue of the Cultural Anthropology journal features a new contribution to the journal’s Openings and Retrospectives section: an Openings collection, “Speed,” edited by Vincent Duclos, Tomás Sánchez Criado, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen. In their introductory essay, the editors discuss…
Yesterday, the New York research institute Data & Society released the report How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (download) that explores how young people use mobile devices, messaging apps, and social media to consume breaking news. Co-authors Mary Madden, Amanda…
Laura A. McNamara describes what ethnographers can do about the cultural equivalent of the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias. “It’s a common category error (at least among the Western psych undergrads who volunteer for experimental lab credits)…
Future Agenda, a non-for-profit UK-based foresight initiative, has just published a new 38-page paper entitled Future of Healthcare Provision: Opportunities for Patient Engagement. Many believe the healthcare sector is ripe for a digital transformation. The escalating challenges it faces are…
Anthropology and its methodologies cannot easily be automated. However, both design and engineering based organizations are attempting it. Anthropologist Sally A. Applin argues that this is based in part on historic legacy systems, a misunderstanding of the ethnographic toolkit, and…
Social science has become increasingly beholden to analysis derived from big data: large numerical sets analysed computationally, write Pamela Prickett and Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University. This, they say, “has brought us much insight into the social world, but…
Don Norman is a technological optimist. The author of The Design of Everyday Things and head of UC San Diego’s Design Lab believes that artificial intelligence might only take the worst parts of our jobs, and when it gets smart…
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…
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.…
During 2016, KPMG conducted an international study on consumer behaviors and preferences related to online shopping. The research was largely based on an online survey of 18,430 consumers living in more than 50 countries. The respondents were between the ages…
It’s rare for a data scientist to be so reflective and critical on the limitations (and therefore the real opportunities) of their discipline, as Katherine Bailey has managed in a short article on Techcrunch. Recent issues around machine learning biases…
During the futurist panel at the 2017 Automotive News World Congress, Rachel Nguyen, executive director of Nissan’s Future Lab, said understanding what the consumer wants will help brands define their experience. One method Nissan utilizes: ethnographic studies of consumers. “The…