Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
EPIC is the premier international gathering on ethnography in the business world. Its latest edition, EPIC2017, took place in Montreal in October 2017 and had the theme of “Perspectives”: perspectives explores the vantage points that create and constrain ethnographic practices. What comes of widening or…
Driverless Cars: On A Road to Nowhere Christian Wolmar London Publishing Partnership Jan 2018, 136 pages Driverless cars are the future. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. Almost daily there are media stories about…
In this paper, Julia Katherine Haines, user experience researcher at Google, argues for the value of multi-dimensional ethnography. She explores the potential for ethnography to venture beyond sites, into different dimensions. As an example of work moving in this direction, she presents a new approach,…
Traditionally the notion of “business” is perceived incongruent with the values of think tanks, writes Melanie Rayment. Those in academia, the third sector, and government policy makers often distinguish themselves in their pursuit of knowledge and positive social change from corporations, where values can be…
The theme of this year’s Service Design Global Conference (November 2-3, Madrid) was Service Design at Scale. Through continued practice, widespread capability building, and successful implementation of service strategy and execution, the face of organisations is changing to deliver great experiences for customers and employees,…
This Anthro Life is a round-table, open format discussion of an anthropological take on the people, objects, ideas, and possibilities of everyday life around the world. They are hosted by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins and there are nearly 100 to chose from. Here are…
Marc Fonteijn, co-founder of the Dutch service design studio 31Volts, has been creating quite an impressive roster of video interviews with some of the leading service design players on his Youtube Service Design Show. The goal of the show is to inspire and connect the…
It’s tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. But Ben Medlock, co-founder of SwiftKey, argues that the layered model of cognition is wrong. The point is that long before we were conscious, thinking beings,…
The introduction of autonomy into urban environments creates a unique opportunity to do things differently. This, writes Maya Pindeus (CEO and co-Founder of Humanising Autonomy) requires us to encourage a human-centered perspective towards urban mobility and to step away from traditional urban planning models. 2050…
Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew J. Salganik Princeton University Press 2017, 448 pages [Read online] An innovative and accessible guide to doing social research in the digital age In just the past several years, we have witnessed the birth…
The world is experiencing a merging of media and minds that we haven’t yet created a vocabulary for. We know that user experience design has the power to respond to what algorithms deem “suitable” to us, but have we understood that this changes the way…
A few months ago a new channel Workplace Anthropology Matters popped up on Youtube that profiles workplace anthropologists, whose work directly influence their own workplace processes. The video series is part of a workshop in the Business Anthropology Matters initiative, run by Dr. Jan English-Lueck,…
As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians – Jeff Leek, Blakeley B. McShane, Andrew Gelman, David Colquhoun, Michèle B. Nuijten & Steven N. Goodman – to recommend one change to improve…
The latest eGovernment benchmark report of the European Commission shows significant improvement on cross-border availability of digital public services and accessibility of public websites from mobile devices in EU Member states. The study also indicates a need for improvement in transparency of public services delivery…
The Policy Methods Toolbox is a repository of policy development methods that helps policy practitioners identify and select the right approach for their policy initiative. It is developed by The Policy Project, a unit of New Zealand’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, aimed…
Two excellent Medium articles by the people of Humanising Autonomy, a London based startup that works towards a vision of intuitive interactions between autonomous systems and people: Child-Friendly Autonomous Vehicles: Designing Autonomy with all road users in mind November 14, 2017 – written by Leslie…
Human-centred design in global health: A scoping review of applications and contexts By Alessandra N. Bazzano (1), Jane Martin (2), Elaine Hicks (3), Maille Faughnan (1), and Laura Murphy (1) PLoS ONE12(11): e0186744. Published: November 1, 2017 Health and wellbeing are determined by a number…
Making Cities Smarter – Designing Interactive Urban Applications by Martin Tomitsch Jovis Publishers March 2018, 208 pages Abstract More than half of the world’s population is now living in cities, and this number is predicted to rise. This means that more people than ever before…
Wide ranging partnership also covers collaboration with design schools and public events on service design “Finding the way forward for independent design means building new business models for service design consultancies in the age of the company buy-out.” Michele Visciola, President, Experientia PRESS RELEASE It…
Designing Better Services: A Strategic Approach from Design to Evaluation by Francesca Foglieni, Beatrice Villari and Stefano Maffei (Polytechnic University of Milan) Springer International Publishing, 2018 VIII, 115 pages This book provides accessible, comprehensive guidance on service design and enables practitioners approaching the discipline for…
Ideally service designers deliver our best value when we stay outside the “Scrum†(literally and figuratively), fulfilling our strategic role and avoiding the hectic pace and too-narrow focus of two-week sprints. Our work, writes Jesse Grimes in the most recent edition of Touchpoint, the magazine…
The design industry’s reigning paradigm is in crisis. It’s time to evolve from human-centered design to humanity-centered design, write Artefact’s Rob Girling and Emilia Palaveeva. If followed blindly and left unchecked, this cult of designing for the individual can have disastrous long-term consequences. A platform…
“Customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult-to-quantify thing for any business,” said Tricia Wang, ethnographer and co-founder of Sudden Compass, in an interview during the IBM Data Science for All event in NYC. She spoke with Dave Vellante and…
BBVA (an international financial institution with a presence in 35 countries, providing services to 70 million customers) was one of the sponsors of the Service Design Global Conference in Madrid last week. Derek White, BBVA’s Global Head of Customer and Client Solutions, and Rob Brown,…
Waymo —formerly the Google self-driving car project— is investing a lot of time and effort on building out the user experience of its self-driving vehicles, which includes both the external and internal user-facing features of its autonomous cars. This includes looking at everything from how…
For all the intricate technology required for autonomous cars — the sensors to replicate eyes and ears, the computers and algorithms to serve as the car’s brains, the high-definition 3-D maps to guide them — there’s another factor that computer science alone cannot solve: how…
Another EPIC conference come and gone, and no, we’re not using “epic” in the way under-10s use it about cool things on the internet. EPIC is the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, one of the most important annual events for practitioners of anthropology, ethnography and…
Service Design Intern: Lausanne, Switzerland and Turin, Italy Experientia, an international experience design consultancy, is looking for service design interns for our Turin, Italy office, to support research, concept development and design. The ideal candidate will be a holistic thinker and designer, with a systems…
Senior Service Designer: Lausanne, Switzerland and Turin, Italy (*) We are looking for service designers with outstanding design skills, methodical thinking, and experience in designing complex service ecosystems using a human-centered design methodology. Â Required 2-5 years’ experience in service design and/or user experience design…
Lead Service Designer: Lausanne, Switzerland and Turin, Italy (*) Experientia is seeking a Senior Service Designer to lead service design projects from the Turin, Italy office (*) or the Lausanne, Switzerland office. The Senior Service Designer will have experience leading a team of behavioral analysts…
Nudges that fail Cass R. Sunstein Behavioural Public Policy, 2017, 1(1), 4-25. doi:10.1017 Why are some nudges ineffective, or at least less effective than choice architects hope and expect? Focusing primarily on default rules, this essay emphasizes two reasons for this. The first involves strong…
by Erin O’Loughlin – Photos: Naz Kazazoglu In Turin, you only need to tell your taxi driver “Take me to the skyscraper” to end up at the impressive Innovation Center of the Intesa Sanpaolo bank, rising in the heart of Turin, with a fine view…
by Erin O’Loughlin Richard Thaler’s 2017 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday was met with more buzz around the offices of our design agency than is usual for economics news. What people outside of the industry probably don’t realize is that service designers don’t think of…
Torino Design of the City is nearly here! Experientia will of course be part of this exciting week (10-16 October) of events, meetings, workshops, exhibitions and guided tours about design, and we warmly invite you to join us. The event is organised by the City…
(This page will be regularly updated to reflect minor programme changes) To Innovate through Service Design – Conference for Torino Design of the City From 10 to 16 October, the City of Turin will host Torino Design of the City. This week of events, meetings,…
The Financial Times has published People’s Technology, an excellent special report on how grassroots communities across Europe are using technologies in new ways to solve problems and empower citizens. People and communities are putting new technologies to use in solving social problems, holding authorities to…
The frustration and stress caused by complex technologies that can seem unknowable — not to mention the time and mindshare that gets wasted trying to make systems work as people want them to work — doesn’t tend to get talked about in the slick presentations…
How can technology lead to more participation in democratic processes? Who should own and control city data? Can cities embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? Albert Cañigueral interviewed Francesca Bria, the chief innovation officer of Barcelona.…
Elizabeth Churchill, Google’s Director of User Experience argues that there has never been a better time for an ethnographic embrace and a reconfiguration of what it means to render meaning into big and small data. We have, she says, an opportunity to resist taking data…