Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), and Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. This…
A few weeks ago, Tricia Wang asked John Payne, a principal of Moment, to write a guest post on Ethnography Matters about his ethnographic field work on Occupy Wall Street. John had facilitated a 2 and half day course of…
Google published yesterday a research report on how consumers use different devices together and navigating the new multi-screen world. They set out to learn not just how much of our media consumption happens on screens, but also how we use…
Across industries, companies are using the vast amounts of user-generated data to guide innovation of new products and services. But data mining does not equate to developing “customer intelligence,” write Lara Lee and Daniel Sobol of Continuum on Harvard Business…
Care at a Distance : On the Closeness of Technology By Jeannette Pols Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012, 204 pages This widely researched study demonstrates convincingly that neither grandiose promises nor nightmare scenarios have much to do with actual care…
Recently I have embarked on trying to understand better the underlying ideology and world view of the Silicon Valley tech scene, and how this is impacting our daily lives through the products and services they create. My mission is still…
In three essays John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflects on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street. Payne was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop…
Brian David Johnson gets paid to predict the future. He is the first, the one, and the only futurist at Intel, charged with envisioning how people will interact with technology a decade from now. Currently, Johnson’s task is to foresee…
“Design Principles for Eating Sustainably: Bridging the Gap Between Consumer Intention and Action” is the title of an ethnographic research driven service design project by Canadian design and innovation firm Cooler Solutions. Experience suggests that our intentions and actions are…
Ethnography Matters has embarked on a new series called “The Ethnographer’s Reading List” with UX professionals discussing their summer reading. Here are the latest three instalments: Nicolas Nova Nicolas Nova, who holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss…
Almost a year ago, Heather Ford was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because…
In a short post on the Huffington Post blog, author Soren Petersen describes how co-design – when firms and non-design users jointly design business and product offerings – is seen as a potential new avenue for breakthrough innovation in design.…
Stephen Shankland thinks that Google is becoming an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it. He also thinks that should both excite and…
A sociologist, ethnographer, and corporate consultant who studies global technology use among migrants, low-income people, youth, and others on society’s fringes, Wang has worked for the past several years in China. Since 2005, she’s crisscrossed the country–often riding the rails–observing…
A team of engineers, anthropologists and psychologists at Intel’s Oregon lab is busy developing ways of integrating human emotion and technology in ways that will, it hopes, lead the two to positively influence each other one day. “Intel is playing…
In her final piece on ethnographic research in a world of big data (see earlier posts), Jenna Burrell, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, seeks to answer a few remaining questions: 1. How might big…
UC Irvine will anchor a new $12.5 million, Intel-funded research center that applies social science and humanities to the design and analysis of digital information. “Technology is profoundly entangled with our everyday lives. As researchers, we can’t get a handle…
Design and AnthropologyEdited by Wendy Gunn, University of Southern Denmark and Jared Donovan, Queensland University of Technology, AustraliaAshgate, 2012Hardcover and ebook Design and Anthropology challenges conventional thinking regarding the nature of design and creativity, in a way that acknowledges the…
Nir Eyal, lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes secrets about human behavior, which provide insights into the way people act even though they can’t tell you why, are levers for creating user habits and competitive…
As a grad student in anthropology, Gabriella Coleman was warned that studying the culture of computer hackers would make it hard to get a job teaching in a university. She went ahead anyway, becoming one of the first academics to…