Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Moments when the experience of a blistering day turns public attention to the expertise of climate scientists brings Hannah Knox, associate professor of anthropology at University College London, to explore some of the thorniest of questions we face in the…
Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave Systems, predicts in TechCrunch that the next big game-changer in technology interface is ambient contextuality. “Ambient contextuality hinges on the idea that there is information hidden all around us that helps…
To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some…
Future Agenda, a non-for-profit UK-based foresight initiative, has just published a new 38-page paper entitled Future of Healthcare Provision: Opportunities for Patient Engagement. Many believe the healthcare sector is ripe for a digital transformation. The escalating challenges it faces are…
As societies face increasingly complex problems, design is emerging as the tool to solve some of Asia’s biggest issues. Through field trips with designers skilled in human-centered design, the team behind Ethnographers’ Field Guide to Innovation, a new series on…
From a Nissan press release (dated August 10, 2016) One profession you might not expect to find at the design table — anthropologist — is playing a key role in developing Nissan’s next generation autonomous vehicle, analyzing human driving interactions to ensure that it…
Over the last five years Ericsson’s Networked Society Lab has been exploring what social life in 2025 might mean. How have 20th structures of industrialization been challenged? What is happening with life and lifestyles right now? In what direction are…
The goal of self-service sites is to help users find answers themselves, forestalling the need to contact a real person. When such a site is done right, it leads you straight from symptoms to diagnosis to cure. However, if self-service…
The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor Picador, 288 pages April 2015 The Internet has been hailed as an unprecedented democratizing force, a place where all can participate equally. But how true…
Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy discussion away from job retraining…
Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab Written by Lucy Kimbell Illustrated by Holly Macdonald Published by the University of Brighton September 2015 This report reviews what design-based approaches bring to policy making. It results from an academic…
Excerpt (above) – full replay Abstract H​ow do we nurture conditions in which a diffuse creativity can flourish and evolve through collaborative organisations and, in so doing, realise meaningful steps towards a more resilient and sustainable society? In his talk…
Back in May 2015, the Urban Futures team of the Future Cities Catapult (based in London, UK) completed a design research project around cycling. This short project uses film to sketch out some possibilities of contemporary technologies such as wearables…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to be one of the most far reaching and fundamental shifts in how people interact with technology and their environment since the advent of the Internet. But, the rush to create new commercial…
In 2009, W Brian Arthur published a remarkable book, The Nature of Technology, in which he formulated a coherent theory of what technology is, how it evolves and how it spurs innovation and industry. Technology, he argued, “builds itself organically…
This year, the research focus of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) is on Human+Machine Futures, the blurring lines between human and machine, natural and artificial. What happens when technology allows us to automate just about anything? What happens when…
Smart Citizens Edited by Drew Hemment and Anthony Townsend Future Everything 2013, 96 pages This publication aims to shift the debate on the future of cities towards the central place of citizens, and of decentralised, open urban infrastructures. It provides…
Below a selection of pieces from The Guardian’s sustainable living hub: The power of behavioural design: looking beyond nudging Christoph Burmester – 10 September 2013 Beyond nudging lies the world of applied behavioural science or, alternatively, the domain of behavioural…
Last year, I posted about the very interesting PhD dissertation by Alice E. Marwick (downloadable here). Based on ethnographic research of the San Francisco technology scene, she explains how social media’s technologies are based on status-seeking techniques that encourage people…
Being surrounded by data makes it easy to see the noise rather than the signal, and the trees rather than the forest, writes Andre Mouton in USA Today. “Nassim Nicholas Taleb achieved notoriety with several books written before the housing…