Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The monthly business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio explores what the future holds for shopping now that retailers are hurting and consumers are expected to keep spending tight for 2009. Portfolio.com takes a look at the phenomenon of “mass customization” —…
The Economist argues that the demise of a popular but unsustainable business model now seems inevitable: The idea that you can give things away online, and hope that advertising revenue will somehow materialise later on, undoubtedly appeals to users, who…
The March issue of Metropolis is focused on products with the theme of Good Design. Several articles are fitting quite well with the topic of this blog: What is good design? By Peter Hall The 20th-century definition of “good design 
Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places.†If data captured from December 2007 through December 2008…
Julian Bleecker of Nokia calls it a “short essay”, but “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction” is really a 97 page book. “Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things…
Darren Waters, technology editor at the BBC, reports from Austin, Texas on the future of touch: “The success of the iPhone has given rise to a new grammar of touch control while the advent of multi-touch in Windows 7 will…
Business Week reports on how some companies like General Electric, Nokia, and others are reversing the traditional process where products are created in rich nations and repackaged for emerging ones: “This month, General Electric’s (GE) health-care division will begin marketing…
Over the last few months, Franco Papeschi and Tory Dunn of the Vodafone User Experience team have been doing work on a set of principles and guidelines to support the formation of ethical / sustainable social enterprise services. They were…
“What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?” A new book, edited by François Jégou and…
The Turin-based non-profit organisation Area, which supports families with disabled children, just launched its new website, developed with the intensive support of Experientia. The site, named Di.To (Disabilità a Torino), offers information and orientation to families of children with disabilities…
Jennifer Bove, a former Interaction-Ivrea student, sent me a link to a case study on a gestural entertainment center that she and a team at Kicker Studio developed for camera maker Canesta: Canesta, Inc. is the inventor of revolutionary, low-cost…
Jukka Jouhki (blog), an anthropologist and post-doc researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has a particular interest in technology. He is currently doing research on South Korean new media culture (2006-2009), human-technology…
One of those things hard to achieve with conferences is a good atmosphere. The recent LIFT conference in Geneva, Switzerland clearly has it down to a science: logistics were so well taken care of that you hardly noticed them (the…
The final session of the 2009 LIFT conference was about new frontiers, devoted to people who are pushing the envelope, and reinventing their fields in the process. Melanie Rieback discussed the evolution of security with regards to RFIDs. Creating the…
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: This device we make in our own image changes everything Renowned computational biologist and educational innovator James Bower believes the Internet, rather than representing some new stage in human development, has simply caught up…
Randall Stross is a New York Times staff writer, who expands on the issue of privacy in an era of social networking — a topic which has also been addressed pointedly and extremely eloquently by Bill Thompson last week at…
The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries, including those who are increasingly consuming computing technologies and services, as well as those for whom access to…
The session devoted to Design Thinking was my personal favourite of the entire 2009 LIFT conference. Beyond the engineers and business’ discourse about the future, what is it designers can propose? What sort of alternatives are they envisioning? What’s the…
The business channel of The Atlantic Online published this weekend the first of two articles by Grant McCracken on the implications of the recession on consumer habits. This article just deals with three variations of a mere quantitative change. The…
Get an overview of the thought process and common strategies for generating prototypes from Dave Cronin, Director of Interaction Design at Cooper. Although applied to Fireworks, Cronin’s discourse is general, especially when he talks about his four reasons for creating…