Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Noah Feehan of the New York Times Research & Development group explores the concept of social wearables: objects that explicitly leverage their visibility or invisibility to create social affordances. “Wearables that engage with the world around me, and particularly with…
Maria Bezaitis, PhD and Principal Engineer of Intel’s User Experience Ethnographic Research Lab, discusses the Real World Web and how internet-enabled sensors will create new kinds of intimacies and engagements. “Commitment and engagement are really powerful sentiments,†said Bezaitis. “The…
The “world’s first family robot†is based on efforts to elicit emotional response in humans—a powerful idea, but one fraught with challenges, writes Will Knight in the MIT Technology Review. “Resembling a static but animated lampshade (with a slightly Hal-like,…
Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose Scribner (July 15, 2014) July 15, 2014 320 pages [Amazon] In the tradition of Who Owns the Future? and The Second Machine Age, David Rose, an MIT…
The people at frog design have been exploring sensing technologies and their impact on the human experience. Two interesting articles are the result: The Qualified Self: Going Beyond Quantification Just as stories yield data, data yield stories. And just as…
The idea of the SMARTiP project is to take the experience developed by a wide range of existing user-driven, open innovation initiatives in Europe, particularly those developed through Living Labs, and to apply this experience to the challenge of transforming…
Museums around the world today face the challenge of increasing and maintaining visitor numbers, especially with younger audiences. A fall in visitors is seen by most as a negative outcome, both financially and in terms of wider social and educational…
A long post by Rick Robinson, Executive Architect at IBM specialising in emerging technologies and Smarter Cities, admonishes Smart Cities planners and designers not to overlook the social needs of cities and communities. After all, he says, the full purpose…
Responsive urban technology sounds enticing but citizens must not be disconnected from plans drawn up on their behalf, argues Gary Graham in The Guardian. “It’s not clear at the moment whether future cities are strategic experiments for [large companies such…
The City as Interface How New Media Are Changing the City By Martijn de Waal nai010 Publishers 2014, 208 pages Digital and mobile media are changing the way urban life takes shape and how we experience our built environment. On…
Chris Carlsson started reading Adam Greenfield’s new book, Against the Smart City, “with the expectation that it would be a critical view of the ways our urban lives have changed during the past half decade with the massive adoption of…
The tech industry easily convinced the public to accept a myriad of free services for the price of some loss of privacy. But getting them to embrace the smart home is going to be a far harder sell, writes Nick…
In addressing the insecurities of postmodern thought, Big Data falls prey to some of the same issues of interpretation, writes Michael Pepi in The New Enquirer. More in particular, Pepi points out that “the conditions that generated postmodernism were an…
Reputation Economics: Why Who You Know Is Worth More Than What You Have by Joshua Klein Palgrave Macmillan Publisher November 2013, 256 pages [Amazon link] Abstract As the internet has increasingly become more social, the value of individual reputations has…
In this age of ubiquitous computing, what exactly are we doing to our bodies, asks Avinash Rajagopal in a highly recommended piece in Metropolis Magazine: “Today, our ï¬ngers are furiously swiping and typing, our shoulders are hunched, our spines are…
“The people using big data don’t presume to peer deeply into people’s souls,” argues David Brooks in the New York Times (in an April 2013 column). “They don’t try to explain why people are doing things. They just want to…
While “Big Data†is causing excitement in the IT and business sector, the practice and concept of data analysis is not unfamiliar to those coming from a UX research background, writes Michael Lai in UX Magazine. The intersection of business…
Can information and technology improve the quality of life in cities? That seems a pretty fundamental question for the Smarter Cities movement to address. There is little point in us expending time and money on the application of technology to…
We, citizens of all cities, take the fate of the places we live in into our own hands. We care about the familiar buildings and the parks, the shops, the schools, the roads and the trees, but far more about…
In this article for UX Magazine, Avi Itzkovitch explores the opportunities the Internet of Things presents to designers. Because the smart fridge is the cliché people usually refer to when discussing the Internet of Things, he uses this mythical smart…