Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Ethnobase is a web resource for ethnographic approaches to studying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The site is based at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology, and aims to network the growing ranks of ICT ethnographers, increasing communication…
INCITE, an incubator affiliated with the University of Surrey (UK), supports critical inquiry into technology and ethnography and provides a creative interdisciplinary space for research projects which explore the socio-cultural dimensions of technology use and design.
In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight’s Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web. Read full interview
This very interesting Global Watch* mission report (which I just finished reading) summarises the results of an official UK field trip to the US to investigate the impact of people-centred research in the design process. The authors were interested in…
[You could call it a less pleasant sort of “experience design”] The Washington Post’s website features a special report consisting of three in-depth articles, two video reports and various graphics that explore how al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla…
The industrial revolution is over, and the machines have won. But as jobs in factories and offices disappear, there are still opportunities to create new kinds of employment. According to Jeremy Rifkin, the first opportunity lies in what he calls…
In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel has set up four new offices in Bangalore, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Shanghai that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets. The four…
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is understood to have made a bid approach to the fast-growing internet phone group, Skype, which may have valued the two-year-old operation at almost $3bn. Read full story
The Los Angeles Times has a feature story on emotional design, examining how emotions drive decisions and how designing with emotion in mind is becoming steadily more important. The story includes comments by Tim Brown, chief executive of IDEO, design…
Is it a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom…
Axel Soojung-Kim Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future and lead blogger of the Institute’s Future Now website sent me some thoughts on how the isolated, autonomous science city has now been displaced by the model of…
Ethiopia, one of Africa’s poorest countries, is spending one tenth of its GDP every year on IT. Over the next five years, the government plans to invest more than $100m (£56m) in public sector computers. It aims to equip hundreds…
An interesting conference RE:activism | Re-drawing the Boundaries of Activism in a New Media environment (unfortunately, the site’s Flash version is really annoying) will take place October 14-15, 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, which is is co-organised by four…
A friend of mine, Lele Dainesi, manages Mash-ups in Italy, a blog on the “rise of cut & paste culture”. It is all in Italian, but insightful if you understand the language. As part of the nicely designed blog, Lele…
John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception, just posted a critical comment on how the EU’s innovation and research programmes put an emphasis on tech rather than on people. For instance, the EU’s Information Society Technologies programme contains, according to…
Oakley Inc. is jumping into the electronic age with sunglasses that play music and work with cell phones as it targets gadget lovers who want more than just protection from the sun. The project involves a collaboration with Motorola and…
Videos have taken on an exciting if uncertain life of their own, far away from the mother ship that launched them. They thrive at online music sites, they’re sold in record stores, they connect strangers across the Internet. And just…
San Francisco’s Department of Elections has become very interested in usability issues of voting quipment. Recently, the department had usability expert Scott Luebking come in to provide the staff some basic training on usability and voting equipment. The training included…
Ambient Devices didn’t realise how many different applications people would find for its data-display invention. It’s a lesson in side effects. Read full story
High tech’s biggest name are keen to set up research operations in India — and not just because of the cheap labor. Sarnoff is one of many Western tech research outfits that have turned to India for its combination…