On this Wiki, everyone’s a critic [Business Week]
Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig, whose next book will be revised by visitors to a collaborative Web site, explains “user-supplied innovation”. Read full story
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Category Methods
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind.…
Does Europe need its own technology institute? [International Herald Tribune]
A proposal to create a European technology institute modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faces serious questions about financing and academic support, lawmakers say. Read full story
MP3 developer yields royalty riche [International Herald Tribune]
German labs rely on firms and state to finance research. Read full story
The future, just around the bend [The Economist]
Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, but he is best known for his wild prognostications about the future. Is he as crazy as he sounds? Read full story
Microsoft Project Seeks ‘A PC in Every Village’ [Seattle Post – Intelligencer]
Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries. A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers…
E-culture advisory
“Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists, musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners work – they have created a new context”. Michiel Schwarz’s insightful Dutch policy paper on “e-culture”, that has just…
Corporate anthropology: dissecting consumer appetites [NPR]
NPR’s Eric Weiner reports on the emerging field of corporate anthropology, where researchers dissect consumer appetites and help engineers build user-friendly products. Listen
Design, key factor for success [Philips]
Speech by Dr. Stefano Marzano, CEO & Chief Creative Director of Philips Design at the German Marketing Association Conference in Hamburg. Read the full speech
2015, a special feature [BBC]
2015 – Where will we be? is the title of a special feature on development issues around the world by the BBC World Trust. Go to the BBC’s 2015 website
Interview with Genevieve Bell, cultural anthropologist at Intel
Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel, has fundamentally changed the way we think about design, technology and culture. Through research and observation, Bell brought to our awareness how concepts of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘individual’ vary from one culture to…
Anthropologists dig into business with ideas for easier living [San Jose Mercury News]
For a summer, Dev Patnaik and his team of researchers hung out with teens preparing to go away to college. Trained in anthropology and sociology, they observed while the teens and their parents shopped for the essentials of college…
We’re all cyberlab rats [Time|CNN]
Anthropologists have deserted the bush to study modern techno-man and how he’s adapting to a world of wild gadgets. Read full story
Design for Future Needs
Designers look into the future to meet people’s needs. Design for Future Needs is a research project that discovered how their methods can help policy makers do the same. The 2002 project, run for the EC by a group of…
Bill’s excellent adventure [Inc.com]
Suddenly, Microsoft cares. If you run a small business, this may be just what you’ve been waiting for. Many companies talk about getting close to the customer, but Microsoft pushed this idea to the extreme when it hired Nelle…