Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Designer Erin Lynch recently interviewed Amélie Lamont, a NYC-based design anthropologist, and the result is quite stimulating, particularly also on the topic gender and racial gaps in the design industry. According to Amélie, “design anthropology focuses on better understanding human…
Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman Current (Penguin Randomhouse), July 2016 256 pages Abstract Why did the New York Stock Exchange suspend trading without warning on July 8, 2015? Why did certain Toyota vehicles accelerate uncontrollably…
A team including the Public Policy Lab (a New York City non-profit) worked with New York City’s Chief Digital Officer and her staff to use ethnographic research to develop the New York City Digital Playbook (available in 14 languages!), a…
Business anthropologist Simon Roberts has campaigned hard for the “Remain” side in the UK referendum and is deeply disappointed. He now explores a topic that I too have been arguing for some time now: Politicians, political parties and those in…
Dr. John Sherry, Director of Business Innovation Research at Intel, says in an long profile on Epicpeople that anthropology is not only undersold, but also misunderstood: People too often talk about ethnography as a tool for understanding “the consumer” or…
Michael Thomas of Ford Motor Company argues in a thoughtful personal piece that User Experience design is greatly enhanced by establishing classical ethnographic methods as foundational for defining the domain of design intervention. How can UX account for subjective, positively…
In this post we highlight a number of Interaction 16 conference videos especially relevant to the Putting People First readers. They are grouped thematically. Algorithm-inspired design Crowds, algorithms and computations: The new materials of design – Matthew Milan, Normative [54:21]…
Gillian Tett is the Financial Times’ US Managing Editor, a very frequent writer, and an anthropologist. Her column this week unconventionally argues for on-the-ground ethnographic research on people’s expectations on inflation: What we need is not just economic analysis of…
PMLiVE continues to inform us about UX approaches and developments in the pharmaceutical industry (older series of articles here): Why health psychology should inform pharma strategyv Ella Nuttall – 30 March 2016 We asked Ella to explain why she thinks…
Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends Hardcover by Martin Lindstrom February 23, 2016 St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of “small data†in his quest to discover the next…
Nine UCL anthropologists spent fifteen months living in nine communities around the world, researching the role, uses and consequences of social media in people’s everyday lives. University College London just launched an enormous repository with the results of this global…
In this article Laura S. Oswald discusses the advantages of semiotic research methods for decoding consumer experiences and translating them into marketing strategy. Oswald focuses specifically on the innovative research techniques we used to decode the meaning of chronic pain…
Arti Mulchand reports in the Straits Times, Singapore’s main newspaper, on Experientia’s “Design for Ageing Gracefully” project: Putting faces to end-users early in the design process is changing the way designers and organisations are approaching products aimed at Singapore’s growing…
Patients Know Best: Qualitative Study on How Families Use Patient-Controlled Personal Health By Hanna Schneider, Susan Hill, and Ann Blandford Journal of Medical Internet Research 2016;18(2):e43 Background: Self-management technologies, such as patient-controlled electronic health records (PCEHRs), have the potential to…
Melissa Cefkin is a Principal Scientist & Design Anthropologist at Nissan Research in Silicon Valley where she explores the potential of having autonomous vehicles as interactive agents in the world. In an article that was published yesterday, she considers two…
When people think of quantitative analytics, big data, and statistics, they rarely picture an anthropologist. The truth is that although anthropology is well known for gathering qualitative data, anthropologists are trained to understand all kinds of data. In many graduate…
Every Thing We Touch: A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives [Tumblr page] by Paula Zuccotti Viking Books, November 2015 256 pages What’s the first thing we touch when we wake up? How do our favourite things reveal our hopes and…
Anthropologist Michael Thompson believes in the power of creativity from below in solving some of the smaller and bigger problems of our time. “People generally are very creative and innovative. Many anthropological case studies have shown that. If development happens,…
Target CEO Brian Cornell’s quest to understand shoppers takes him inside customers’ homes, looking in their cupboards and closets during pre-arranged visits. The Target Corporation is the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, behind Walmart. It is headquartered in…
In June 2015, Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate how prepared mobile marketers are to deliver to consumers during quick mobile “moments” – i.e. — instances when they reflexively turn to their devices to act on a need to learn,…