John Maeda designs technology’s human side
On Fora.TV you can find a video of RISD president John Maeda’s talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 expo, where he discusses people participation processes at RISD. Watch video
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
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Wired economics
Nokia’s Ideas Project published a feature story on why technology may be making money superfluous. “We’re entering a time in which products are expected to give themselves over as platforms for innovation and reinvention. Even money, something we tend to…
Science alone will not save us
Changing behaviour will be as vital as new technologies in tackling climate change. So where is the funding for linguists, anthropologists and sociologists? Tariq Tahir reports in The Guardian. “Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional…
Portfolios of the Poor: Financial diaries of the bottom billion
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven Princeton University Press Hardcover, May 2009 Abstract About forty percent of the world’s people live on incomes of…
Museums and libraries in a digital age
The Futures of Learning blog, which is associated with a MacArthur Foundation project, just announced a new blog series that reports on the literature review conducted as part of the project, Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in…
How the mobile phone became an ‘instrument for life’
The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a study of more than 1000 workers which shows that the mobile phone does not make people any more rushed or pressured for time. An analysis of more than 20,000 calls and texts…
Mobile Literacy
Our friends at Adaptive Path have posted some information on a design and research project that aimed to understand how mobile technology can work more effectively in emerging markets. The company went to rural India to investigate the impact of…
New media practices in China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan and Ghana
The blog series on New Media Practices in International Contexts, which I announced in January, is now complete. It covers the unique characteristics of digital media user behaviours in very different socio-cultural contexts of China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan…
Us Now
Watch this excellent 1 hour documentary film about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. “In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s…
Everybody’s a manufacturer: era of user-generated devices
Further on my earlier theme of “we are all hackers now“, here is a long feature on user-generated devices by Fumitada Takahashi and Phil Keys in the Nikkei Electronics Asia magazine (Japan). “User-Generated Devices (UGD), allowing people to enjoy themselves…
Johanna Brewer about ethnography and design
Nicolas Nova reports today on a lecture by Johanna Brewer about “What can ethnography do for technology?â€. Brewer, who is a PhD candidate in the Informatics department at the University of California, Irvine and a collaborator of Paul Dourish in…
Business Innovation Factory launches Student Experience Lab
The non-profit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) yesterday launched a new laboratory to enable innovation in higher education. The lab will support the design of solutions that increase college attainment levels, enhance the college student experience and improve the quality and…
Bringing the everyday life of people into design
“Bringing the everyday life of people into design” is the title of a doctoral dissertation that Froukje Sleeswijk Visser is defending today to obtain her doctoral degree in industrial design engineering at the Technical University Delft. Summary Products play a…
Design and ethnography at a ubiquitous computing conference
One of the sessions at UbiComp 2008, the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous computing (Seoul, Korea), was devoted to design and ethnography. The four papers are all in the proceedings, but (except for the first one) you will need an…
The wisdom of community
In an article on A List Apart, Derek Powazek explores what it means to connect the ideas of James Surowiecki, expressed in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, to the social web where, he says, they can reach their full…
Inspiring articles by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research
If you like the writings by the highly original Elizabeth Churchill, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research in charge of the Internet Experiences Group — and I definitely do! — then this Spring has been a particularly rewarding period.…
The poverty of user-centered design
Andrew Dillon, dean of the School of Information (“iSchool”) at the University of Texas, writes on his blog InfoMatters that he finds “the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore”, since “truly understanding the user seems beyond both established…
User-centred approach drives the design of Intel’s new home storage solution
In December last year, Intel design researcher Daria Loi made a very strong presentation at the UPA Europe conference showing how people in different cultures “keep, protect and find what they value”. She and others in her team actually went…
Taking my community ‘to go’
The latest issue of Vodafone’s Receiver Magazine is entitled “Seizing the Moment”: “Bending and transcending the constraints of time and space has gotten easy for us. With our mobiles and netbooks, we’re about to create a social setting in which…
As consumers’ demands change, designers are all in the behavior business
Over the past few months, frog design’s Robert Fabricant has been “busy riling up the design community with a theory that designers are now in the ‘behavior business’”. “Innovation is not just about putting the right new feature into…