Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
A few months back we wrote about the ongoing negotiations between Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, and the [Italian Foundation] Compagnia di San Paolo to set up a Nesta Italia in Turin. These negotiations have now finished and the results were announced today in La…
With an ageing population, a rise in long-term conditions, growing health inequalities and a lack of political will to ensure that funding is increased in line with demand, the UK’s National Health Service has been brought to breaking point. In this context, there is an…
The people at Studio, the design, development and workflow laboratory at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, are working on the design and the development of a “new kind of mobile museum experience”. Because they would like the share mistakes and successes with the broader museum community,…
Behavioural Public Policy is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and its relevance to public policy. The study of human behaviour has recently taken on growing importance within many disciplinary specialties and in recent years the findings from this field have…
Business anthropologist Martha Bird’s specialty is designing technologies that work for people, creating conversational user interfaces and chatbots that can serve different professional audiences across different geographies and different cultures. An interview excerpt: Why are people’s relationships with technology so important? Any technology development and…
Murray Goulden writes in The Conversation that smart homes, wearables and the Internet of Things are indicative of the development of an entire class of technologies seeking to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives. These technologies want to be ubiquitous, seamlessly spanning the physical…
In January of this year, Sakari Tamminen and Elisabet Holmgren of the Finnish/USA innovation agency Gemic, published a paper on EPIC entitled “The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical“. A wide range of new digital products lumped together under the category…
Ripostato da Medium – English version Il mondo del fashion sta diventando sempre di più digitale. Non si tratta solo di dispositivi da indossare, ma anche e soprattutto di abbigliamento, realizzato con tessuti in cui sono effettivamente integrati dei sensori in grado di misurare e…
Today the print edition of the Italian newspaper Repubblica published an article with the title Nesta, i campioni dell’innovazione puntano su Torino. Below is the English translation (with English-language links added by us): Nesta, the champions of innovation, point to Turin The UK Foundation is…
“Technologists have done a terrible job with security technology so far”, writes David Maher, and “now we are about to impose those failures onto the physical world on a scale that only ubiquitous, pervasive, even invasive computing and connectivity can accomplish. Continuing the status quo…
Data Ethnographies is a Lab of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC), at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Data Ethnographies investigates the implications of the increasing ubiquity of data in everyday lives and worlds. We approach data from an ethnographic perspective to: develop insights into…
Reposted from Medium – Versione italiana The world of fashion is becoming increasingly digital — and not just wearable devices, but with clothing made from fabrics that actually integrate sensors and technology that can monitor and measure the wearer. As fashion starts to go beyond outward appearance,…
A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reveals that customer experience is vital for business success, and establishes social media as the foundation for customer experience. The survey, which includes 600+ leaders from the world’s biggest brands, also shows that companies embracing social…
Quantitative Ethnography David Williamson Shaffer Boswell Press Available April 2017 > Download Introduction > Watch video presentation This is a book about understanding why, in the digital age, the old distinctions between qualitative and quantitative research methods, between the sciences and humanities, and between numbers…
“It is often tempting to think that the 21st-century world is so closely integrated and digitised that the issue of culture is becoming irrelevant,” writes Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. “But behind the scenes, a growing number of companies appear to be quietly realising…
In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is conducting ethnographic, human-centered research to design middle-income housing that reflects people’s lived experiences, reports the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This includes intensive planning sessions in which residents, designers, and policy experts co-create policy blueprints. As…
ONE Design is a content portal where Capital One, the eighth-largest bank in the United States, shares (many) inspiring stories of how their Adaptive Path designers “impact lives with humanity, simplicity, ingenuity – and empower people to have better control over their money.” Selected stories…
The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information by Paul Dourish MIT Press, May 2017 264 pages Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical infrastructures of server farms, fiber…
In an extensive review of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, the book by Michael Lewis on the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Tamsin Shaw provides a deeper criticism of the field of behavioral economics. He claims that behavioral science can…
Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design By Jeff Johnson and Kate Finn Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, March 2017 258 pages > First chapter Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design presents age-friendly design guidelines that are well-established, agreed-upon, research-based,…
In this recent talk at the RCA in London, writer and academic Jeremy Myerson explores how social challenges can catalyse design-led innovation in industry. Rather than seeing such issues as ageing populations, growing healthcare needs or climate change as a problem or a crisis, designers…
Jacqueline Poh, CEO of Singapore’s GovTech agency, spoke about the importance of a service design approach at the Innovation by Design Conference 2017, held from 7-8 March as part of Singapore Design Week. Whether or not the public thinks that a policy, process or service…
A fertile relationship is growing between anthropology and business. Marketers are finding that anthropologists gather very useful knowledge by studying consumers in their natural habitat using the ethnographic techniques of observation and interviewing. A leader in this field is Bill Beeman, PhD, a professor and…
Patrick G. Watson, lecturer in the Sociology department and Social Psychology program at McMaster University, Canada, has recently published a thoughtful review of two business ethnography books: Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities By Jordan, B. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press,…
Behavioral Economics and Health Judd B. Kessler and C. Yiwei Zhang Oxford Textbook of Global Public Health 2014 Behavioral Economics combines the insights of Economics and Psychology to identify how individuals deviate from the standard assumptions of economic theory and to build systematic deviations into…
As reported by Knowledge@Wharton, the London-based Agency of Design (AoD) came up with three different approaches, “each of which embodies a different strategy to designing circularity from the outset”: They are (1) designing for longevity (and durability), which also implies having an approach to an…
To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,537 responded to this effort…
It’s that time of year again – Milan’s don’t-miss event for the design community is here. If you’re looking to get inspired at Milan Design Week, then check out our top picks for the latest edition, from Experientia’s designers, strategists and partners. Milan might be…
Dan Hill (Associate Director, Arup, London) reflects in a long essay on the meaning of identity in the face of Brexit and Trump and what that implies for strategic design, service design and the infrastructure of everyday life. A few excerpts: “Cultural identity is complex.…
Matt Yurdana of Intel’s IoT Experiences Group discusses Intel’s insight on passenger experience in the age of autonomous transportation. The intimate nature of autonomous vehicles will most likely lead to a significant rethinking of vehicle interiors, he writes, in particular when it comes to designing…
Every two years the city of Turin hosts the Biennial of Democracy, an event of conversation and debate, that seems to become more timely and necessary as years go by. The current fifth edition will run from 29 March to 2 April, the theme is…
The British consumer cooperative Co-op uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches to make decisions about products. While quantitative research is best when you want to understand the scale of something (such as how many users do X or Y, or how much of something is…
The Think Forward Initiative is an open source initiative by ING, CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research), Dell EMC, Microsoft, Dimension Data and Deloitte. Its goal is to gain a deeper understanding of financial decision making and to empower people to make financial decisions that…
“Business as Unusual†was the theme of the ninth annual Service Design Global Conference held in Amsterdam and in its play on words, it recognises that service design is more and more becoming an established way of ‘doing business’, whether in organisations, or in places…
The latest issue of the Cultural Anthropology journal features a new contribution to the journal’s Openings and Retrospectives section: an Openings collection, “Speed,” edited by Vincent Duclos, Tomás Sánchez Criado, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen. In their introductory essay, the editors discuss how they hope to open…
Yesterday, the New York research institute Data & Society released the report How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (download) that explores how young people use mobile devices, messaging apps, and social media to consume breaking news. Co-authors Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, and Claire Fontaine find…
Behavioural Insights and Public Policy: Lessons from Around the World OECD, March 2017 408 pages “Behavioural insightsâ€, or insights derived from the behavioural and social sciences, including decision making, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, organisational and group behaviour, are being applied by governments with the aim…
Laura A. McNamara describes what ethnographers can do about the cultural equivalent of the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias. “It’s a common category error (at least among the Western psych undergrads who volunteer for experimental lab credits) that describes our tendency to…
From a young age, humans love to press buttons that light up and make a noise. The thrill of positive feedback lies at the heart of addiction to gambling, games, and social media, reports Adam Alter for The Guardian. “The sense of creating something that…
Swiss designer, entrepreneur, and sustainability advocate Yves Béhar points out that there are no high-level manifestos or guidelines for designers working with AI, robotics, and connected technology today. Last week, in a talk delivered at the inaugural A/D/O/ Design Festival in Brooklyn, Béhar presented his…