Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A recent HarvardBusiness.org article about the use of anthropology and ethnography in global R&D strategies (blogged about here), has got Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase a bit worked up, as he thinks it “largely misses the point”. “For all the…
Stefana Broadbent, the acclaimed tech anthropologist, will be an invited speaker at the upcoming TEDGlobal conference (21-24 July, Oxford, UK). Stefana is currently a visiting research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, and was the head…
The latest issue of Ambidextrous, Stanford University’s journal of design, has just been published. The issue is entirely online. Two of my favourite articles: Mind the gap: ethnographers navigate the space between users and designers (pages 40-42) An interview of…
Navi Radjou argues on the HarvardBusiness.org Voices blog that R&D in emerging markets needs fewer engineers and more anthropologists. “To effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer base in emerging markets, I believe multi-national…
This week the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion hosted a conference about the “Bottom of the Pyramid” and Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik and writing director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, has…
Natasha Schull, assistant professor in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, says Vegas gambling machines designed to get people to ‘play to extinction’. “After more than a decade of research that included lengthy observations and interviews focused on…
Consumer Electronics 3.0 is the name Intel has chosen for a new concept of seamless integration of internet and television. The CE 3.0 website is rich in content, but more than that, it exemplifies the relevance of a user-centred approach…
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: 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
What on earth are anthropologists doing playing with mobile phones, asks Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and creator of FrontlineSMS. “It’s widely recognised that projects can succeed or fail on the realisation of their relative impacts on target communities, and…
A controversial post by Sam Ladner, followed by a rich debate between the author, Paula Thornton, Peter Merholz, Raymond Pirouz, and others. Design is attractive to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique…
ACM reports that “a top researcher for Nokia Design [addressed] the need for effective cross-culture design research when developing informed and inspired designs for future mobile technologies. Jan Chipchase, who studies how people around the world behave, communicate, and interact…
If you ever need a solid case on why ethnographic research can provide strategic value to companies, yesterday’s announcement of the $250 million Intel/GE healthcare alliance provides you with a great one. Intel has for years heavily invested in on-the-ground…
The Wall Street Journal reports on work done by Intel’s Digital Home Group on people’s tendency to lie online and what the implications of lying are on the design of new technologies. “[Ethnographer Francoise] Bourdonnec, for example, works for Intel’s…
Informal networks are the links and exchanges that bind people together, explains Dr Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist and an expert on social networks in business. She describes the challenge of creating a new transparent networked economy as, “a gargantuan…
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…