Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
MIT has established seven so-called Fabrication Labs in places as distant as Norway and Ghana. Each lab has tool sets that, costing about $25,000, would be out of the reach of most fledgling inventors. Advocates of such “Fab Labs” think…
John Robb has been applying the analytic paradigm of shared, open source networking tools to urban warfare in his blog Global Guerrillas and has come to some highly original and thought provoking insights. His latest comments on what is happening…
Under new policies and initiatives from its Ministry of Communications, Italy is turning to Wi-Fi and WiMAX to make broadband Internet access more universally available throughout the country. On October 4th, the Minister for Communications, Mario Landolfi, issued a new…
This week’s column by Joanna Glasner of Wired News includes input from an assortment of experts who share their views on top contenders to be the technologies of tomorrow. Interestingly, Ian Pearson, futurist at British Telecommunications, focuses on simplicity…
The Workshop on Digital Inclusion and Participation in Brussels on 23 September 2005 aimed at setting the scene for the EU’s i2010 ambitions: an inclusive information society that provides high quality public services and promotes quality of life. It involved…
“Strange that Inform.com, the latest online newsreader, didn’t include its own much-promoted launch in today’s inaugural Lead Story headlines. It didn’t make its own business or tech sections either. Not even entertainment. Remarkable editorial restraint, I’d say, for a startup…
As companies seek a better understanding of their customers, designers explore more user-centred methods and educators introduce social issues into the curriculum, the time is right for inclusive design. That was the encouraging message to emerge from the third Include…
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has been presenting audiences with a prediction and a challenge about the free culture movement: Ten Things that Will be Free. Jimmy’s list is inspried by David Hilbert’s address to the International Congress of Mathematicians…
Companies are embracing the potential of networked computing to let workers share their knowledge more efficiently as they nurture new ideas, new products and new ways to digitally automate all sorts of tasks. [They] are drawing on collaborative models that…
Demos, the British think tank for everyday democracy and the publisher of The Greenhouse weblog, organises a series of monthly discussions about innovation and future leadership in education and public services, called Open Secrets. Tellingly, the latest discussion, which was…
A “social” web browser has been created to meet the needs of a new generation of web users who want to edit, comment on and share web content, rather than just peruse it. With the underlying capabilities of a basic…
When Lego executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: they cheered. Unlike executives at so many corporations, who would…
In a blog that talks about participatory design and how users can contribute to the design of services, we cannot sidestep the ethical issue. Often people’s creativity and cultural contributions are used against their own interests. In a long and…
A video-blogger from Bergen in Norway is aiming to energise a new generation of voters ahead of Norwegian parliamentary elections, and turning his camcorder on politicians. Read full story
Glocalmap.to (site currently in Italian only) is a large-scale cultural “social tagging” project that integrates web mapping, thematic tagging and mobile phone messaging, to create a new urban narrative for the city of Turin. It allows citizens and visitors alike…
The increasing ubiquity and popularity of mass SMS-enabled but temporary political affiliation may actually end up bringing its demise. These are not true bottom-up, spontaneous, grass-roots expressions of networked solidarity, nor even representations of groups willing to follow up on…
Developed by LeapFrog Enterprises, a maker of educational toys, the amazingly clever Fly “pentop” computer is just what it sounds like: a talking computer hidden within a pen the size of an electric toothbrush. The gadget, which contains an actual…
Lego released a new version of Lego Factory, a recently launched brand that combines Digital Designer — free software that lets children create their own 3D models — with the ability to let customers to share their personal designs as…
For all its rough spots and blog pretensions, Current is for-profit public-access television, an attempt to add grass-roots diversity to a television universe that is ever more controlled by a few media conglomerates. Current is easily mocked, but it is…