Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
2012 One-to-one Tablets in Secondary Schools: An Evaluation Study (see also here and here) Dr Barbie Clarke and Siv Svanaes, Family Kids and Youth, UK, 2012 Research was carried out between September 2011 and July 2012 and included a literature…
“The material world is a world of social potential. Social scientists should be better equipped to engage with materials and objects through ethnographic, critical, analytical, presentational and collaborative skills. Designers, artists, engineers, architects and curators should be better equipped to…
Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork Richard E. Ocejo (Editor) Routledge, 2012, 272 pages (Amazon link) The only collection of its kind on the market, this reader gathers the work of some of the most esteemed urban…
Marco Steinberg, who directs the strategic design efforts of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, announced last week that Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab will close in June 2013. Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra to advance strategic design as…
A Sustainable Building Promotes Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Observational Study on Food Disposal by Wu DW, DiGiacomo A, Kingstone A PLoS ONE 8(1): e53856. doi:10.1371 – January 2013 In order to develop a more sustainable society, the wider public will need…
The day is not far off when the manipulation of medical devices will be done routinely by punching keys on a smartphone, writes Charles C. Mann in Vanity Fair, putting an individual’s internal organs in the hands of every hacker,…
Deutsch’s Douglas Van Praet discusses how focus-group feedback, and the whole notion of the consumer, are misguided and how research should focus on understanding the unconscious and improving human lives. “How [market] research studies are done is at sharp odds…
Gianfranco Zaccai is co-founder and president of the global design and innovation consultancy Continuum. And he doesn’t like focus groups very much (and neither do we): Why Focus Groups Kill Innovation, From The Designer Behind Swiffer 18 October 2012 The…
Zach Hyman is based in Chongqing, China on a year long ethnographic dive into creative practices of vehicular design among resource-constrained users. After four months in the field, Zach shares with Ethnography Matters his first field update. His observations on…
Anthropologist Donna Flynn directs Steelcase’s WorkSpace Futures, a 19-member independent research group within the global office design company, that is responsible for “thinking into the future”: understanding the trends shaping the ways we work and sharing that intelligence with Steelcase…
Two months ago I wrote about what was then one of the first qualitative studies on the impact of tablets in schools: “Carphone Warehouse (corporate site), a UK mobile phone retailer, recently commissioned the Family Kids and Youth research agency…
This ECAR research bulletin describes an anthropological ethnographic analysis of student practices relating to the use of information technology on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. Using EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) studies as benchmarks, this imaginative research examines…
In her work anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster applies anthropological principles to the study of the university’s libraries and their users. By focusing on the work that people are doing inside these spaces, they can identify needs and imagine new solutions…
BBC News has published a 5 minute video feature on Cambridge University’s Design Centre where they test how elderly people use technology. Must-have modern gadgets are designed by young people with young people in mind – that is the view…
Recent reports from McKinsey’s iConsumer Global Research Initiative: Moving from “mobile first†to “touch first†December 2012 (published on the EconomistGroup site) Already, more than a third of the time people spend web browsing, using social networking sites, and using…
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her four-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s…
Business Technology 2020 Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of data. These are some of the responses IT leaders gave to us when we asked, “What will business technology look like in 2020?†In 2020, tech…
Brand experience agency edenspiekermann_ and Volkswagen’s Service Innovation Team explored what it takes to define a service that would play a relevant role in people’s lives. “We started with: Who are the people that use carsharing? How can we expand…
Ethnography can be used to inform important health and policy decisions. But there are few public case studies that illustrate the value of ethnography for this specific context. When Erik Bigras of EthnographyMatters learned about The Asthma Files, a project…
The war between natives and immigrants is ending. The natives have won, argues Oliver Joy on the CNN website. It was a bloodless conflict fought not with bullets and spears, but with iPhones and floppy disks. Now the battle between…