Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The French think tank Fing (who was also behind the LIFT France event last year) collaborated last year with VIA, Promotelec, Renault Group, La Poste, Minatec Laboratory (CEA), CNR Santà, ESIR Engineering school on a research project called “Connected homes…
After her much talked about piece “Does corporate ethnography suck?” – which presented a cultural analysis of academics critiques of industry ethnography as a second rate or illegitimate forms of ethnography – Sam Ladner followed up with two more posts…
Sierra Wireless’ new USB cellular modems show how user-centred design can help differentiate products in a commoditised market. Matt Plested of Alloy, the agency which helped Sierra design the products, explained to Mex how they explored user environments for USB…
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University published a substantial new report from the Youth and Media project: “Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality” by Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, & Ashley Lee.…
Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011. Abstract While mobile HCI…
Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact…
In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia: “Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.†But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that…
Two interesting posts by Danish photographer and visual ethnographer Jacob Langvad Nilsson: Business ethnography as a key strategy for international brands When penetrating new markets, two critical mistakes seem to repeat themselves. The first mistake involves thinking that because it…
Applying Anthropology in the Global Village Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp. Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5) Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2) The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of…
During the Pop!Tech conference, well known design researcher Jan Chipchase gave a talk about his research work. In the panel session an audience member asked two questions relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone…
Jan Chipchase thinks that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house through a clever use of…
Steven Portigal interviews Julian Bleecker about the near future, design fiction and storytelling. Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher in the Advanced Projects studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles and the Near Future Laboratory where he investigates…
In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research: “To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006…
Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China — the rural poor, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers — to research the impacts of three decades…
Sondre Ager-Wick, Nokia’s Head of Design Strategy and Foresight, discusses the evolution and future of mobile design. His new trends: – DIY design – Electronically enhanced senses – The smartification of everything – Less digital bling. More content first. –…
Homesense was a research project that looked at how we might design smart homes from the bottom up, in an environment of open innovation. Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures…
“Homage to Catalonia II” is a documentary, a research project, a story of stories about the construction of a sustainable, solidary and decentralized economy. The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN…
Chapter ten of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview and deals with end-user development. Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity. They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters,…
Fjord, the digital design consultancy, has just completed a white paper called “Design for Context: Understanding How User Context is Evolving”, looking at the background to context-sensitive design and current approaches, as well as providing high-level design recommendations for using…
Tricia Wang reflects on the fact that ethnographic work is often invisible. One way to overcome this, she argues, is for ethnographers to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value. This is…