Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
This week the Financial Times has run two reports on the Millennial Generation. Part Two (pdf) came out today, whereas Part One is from June 3. Part Two’s leading article is definitely worth exploring, particularly in how it connects technology…
For future smart cities to thrive, it must be centred around people, not just infrastructure. This was the overwhelming message from a group of influential thinkers speaking at this year’s FutureEverything Summit. sustain’ went along to find out what smart-city…
To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Public Affairs Book, 2013 432 pages [Amazon] Abstract In the very near future, “smart†technologies and “big data†will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions…
The Designing Design Education for India (DDEI) Conference, which will take place in March 2013 in Pune, India, has an unusual, but engaging format: “This will be an interactive conference. Unlike other conferences where the presenters speak from one side…
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…
As a people-centred design company, Experientia frequently uses participatory design methods in its projects. We believe that people are usually the best experts on their own lives, and participatory methods help us to tap into that expertise, to create an…
Model and actress Lily Cole’s social network, Impossible, has been designed for users to meet and help each other. Users post requests (say, “I wish to have a haircut”), and anyone in their local network can offer to help. The…
The BBC have just released some interesting research around participation online, writes Neil Perkin on FutureLab. The findings (the result of a “large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today”) have raised a little…
When we talk about social media we are really only talking about tools that we can use to help us and the people we engage to achieve a task. To make a success in social media we need to understand…
In an article for UX Magazine, Catalina Naranjo-Bock provides a solid general description of co-designing processes: “The practice of co-design allows users to become an active part of the creative development of a product by interacting directly with design and…
Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T., says we use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right: the Goldilocks effect. “Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied…
Henry Alford, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, wonders when in the digital age, did privacy become a choice rather than a given. “When Facebook bought Instagram, the social photo app for iPhone and Android devices, on April 9, a chorus…
In his book “Wicked problems: Problems worth solving“, author John Kolko (founder and director of Austin Center for Design) argues that involving end users in the entire design process ensures a humane design solution. He now summarises his argument in…
The argument of this pamphlet, written by Charles Leadbeater for IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research, the UK’s leading progressive thinktank) is that we should jettison the assumption that humans are selfish, first and foremost. Instead, we should start…
Ramesh Srinivasan methodically breaks down five ‘myths’ about social media in this Washington Post article: Here are his myths (which few in the UX community would flatly believe in, I think): 1. Social media gives power to the people 2.…
Architects and construction companies can learn a lot still from the techniques of ethnographers and UX designers. Here is an example from the Real Estate section of the Washington Post: “What do home buyers want? For more than two decades,…
The Summer 2011 edition of the RSA Journal explores the relationship between business and social change. Brand values As the social, political and commercial spheres become more intertwined, firms are increasingly finding incentives to look beyond the bottom line. Colin…
Jim Whitehurst, chief executive and president of Red Hat Inc., the only publicly traded open-source software company, sees user collaboration as the wave of the future, not only for technology companies but for the business world at large. Mr. Whitehurst…
Forget Web 2.0. During a panel on social media at the recent Wharton Global Alumni Forum, industry experts argued that we are now in a “third wave” of disruption in the tech sector. While the post-bubble era was about user-generated…
Peter Lunenfeld (wikipedia), professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, argues in a New Scientist op-ed piece for the importance of what he calls “meaningful uploading”, which is still difficult for most people since “for the past…