Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Research institutions often face the challenge on how to best translate their scientific discoveries into commercially successful products and services. So how can design speed up technological research’s journey from the lab to the marketplace? The UK’s Design Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences…
If any single business theme emerged from the 22 sessions on innovation at Davos, it is that CEOs realize that their current corporate organizations and cultures need to be dramatically changed, and that new people with new skills have to be hired. This was brought…
We can either stumble into the future and just hope it turns out all right or we can try and shape it. A government thinktank charged with considering the future of UK transport in the next 50 years, just released its report on what future…
During the Fall semester of 2005, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design teamed with MAYA Design to do a long-distance academic collaboration. Students were given the Strategic Plan 2001-2005 of the National Park Service and were asked to develop a hypothetical roadmap for the…
Given the opportunity to start a new media empire from scratch, what would be the ideal approach? Four high-ranking media executives who were in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum last week, shared their visions with Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune. Gerhard…
“Blogs, the free-form online journals that have gained wide popularity, are making inroads in the newsrooms of what bloggers sometimes derisively call the mainstream media”, writes Bruno Giussani in today’s International Herald Tribune. “An increasing number of editors and reporters seem to accept that…
Experience Matters is the name of a section on the Macromedia website where the company wants to show its customers "what great experiences are, how they deliver better business results and how to create them". "Macromedia is motivated by the belief that great experiences…
Eventbranche is a Dutch-language blog of Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat where you can view (English-language) videos of recent presentations by Marc William Hansen, chief experience officer at LEGO (on experience co-creation) and by Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy (on the digital experience). (via CPH127)
Following the publication of Pine & Gilmore’s book “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage”, the University of Amsterdam founded the European Centre for the Experience Economy to create a place and network for fundamental academic research on experiences and transformations…
The 2007 Bower Award and Prize will be presented to a distinguished scientist in the field of Human-Centered Computing.The Bower Award for Achievements in Science is presented annually by The Franklin Institute to a researcher of any nationality for outstanding work in the applied or…
Karl Long of Customer Experience Strategy reviews shopcomposition.com, a shopping site that sells an extremely eclectic mix of products, it seems like a stylish, urban outfitters for grown ups. The web site is a flash extraviganza that puts boo.com to sham, essentially breaks every rule…
The new version of Mindstorms, Lego’s all-time best-selling product, was developed with the help of a Mindstorms User Panel, with the aim of developing a better product but also a tighter, more trusting bond between corporation and customer. A lengthy article in Wired Magazine explains…
Some years ago, the media office at the Embassy of Finland in Washington, D.C. saw the potential and possibilities of investing time and effort on children as a novel target group for building relations and international understanding. This was the beginning of Project Finland, a…
Finnish designer Ulla-Maaria Mutanen (aka The HobbyPrincess) argues that small communities will have to radically change their innovation policy in the near future. This will include the moving from strictly institutional, business-oriented idea of innovation and competence development towards an idea of innovation as practice-based,…
Business Week reports on the recent Challenges of Design Promotion in Europe conference which drew new attention to areas where European businesses excel — and fall short A recent conference in Paris, called Challenges of Design Promotion in Europe and sponsored by the French design…
CNET’s Release 1.0 editor in chief Esther Dyson sits down with ZDNet editor in chief Dan Farber to discuss the upcoming PC Forum conference which takes place on March 12-14, 2006 in Carlsbad, California. The theme of the conference is the rise of the…
Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be attending the meanwhile sold out LIFT conference next week. If some of the Putting People First readers are going to Geneva as well, do seek him out. Aside from his role in Experientia, Jan-Christoph is also a senior associate…
Over the past decade, Korea’s Samsung Electronics has transformed itself from a copycat producer of uninspiring goods into one of the world’s top consumer-electronics brands. Much of that transformation is due to a shift in power at the company from engineers to designers. Samsung’s rebirth…
“Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it’s about everything,” writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, “Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic.” Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history…
Apparently a must-read if you work on sites with large amounts of information: Designing for the Scent of Information The essentials every designer needs to know about how users navigate through large web sites By Jared M. Spool, Christine Perfetti and David Brittan The users…
A new look at what makes up accessibility. “Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis,…
The room looks like a typical child’s playtime fantasy, decorated with bright carpet and packed with toys, games, costumes, and an indoor jungle gym. But it is also lined on one side with windows and on the other with a one-way mirror. On this rainy…
A useful book concentrating on the important “user experience†aspects of design for small screen devices The design of interactive applications or presentations on small screens can be challenging for the designer. Not all design concepts that are valid on larger screens can be implemented…
While the emerging generation’s deftness with technology is a given, researchers say the most potent byproduct may be the feedback factor, which only accelerates the cycles of what’s hot and what’s over. “We think that the single largest differentiator in this generation from previous…
The ID-StudioLab of the TU Delft covers research in four areas: designing for the senses, designing and emotion, inspiration engineering and intelligence in products. The challenge of the ID-StudioLab is to shape the conditions for a satisfactory product experience. Traditionally, products are designed for their…
DMI, the Design Management Institute, has just released a free pdf download of a Spring 2005 article by Stefano Marzano, CEO of Philips Design, entitled “People as a Source of Breakthrough Innovation”. “The product visions are startling—jackets with cell phones and MP3 players, multimedia furniture,…
Seamless mobility links us to our world anytime, anywhere, and in the mind’s eye of John Finan, a Duke University graduate student and grand prize winner of Motorola’s first-ever MOTOFWRD competition, it may soon help interpret the tones and mood of every day life. Designed…
What are the key design tasks facing the new post-agricultural rural economies and settlements? A conference in the UK in September will map out a new role for the arts and design in response to new social, environmental and economic regeneration priorities. The conference…
Gotoreport is the regular newsletter of Gotomedia, a San Francisco based strategic consultancy specialised in research, visual design and user experience design. In the January 2006 edition, Leigh Duncan reminds us that as we look forward to Web 2.0 and future technologies, it’s important…
Tim Brown, head of IDEO, who will be speaking and moderating at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF), thinks it is precisely the power and ability of design that made the organisers decide to make design central to the conference: “The WEF is at an…
Experientia, the international experience design consultancy (that is also responsible for this blog), launches today “Experientia interviews…”, a series of dialogues with leading professionals on the topic of user experience, user-centred design, design strategy and innovation. The inaugural interview is with Richard Eisermann (pictured here),…
Adam Richardson, a strategy director at frog design has created a new blog that immediately starts off with a thoughtful piece on managing the user experience performance and understanding the experience/expectation gap. “Developing complex products today – cellphones, digital music, cars – is challenging…
The Christian Science Monitor caries a highly amusing article by reporter Peter Ford on his quest to obtain some tickets to the Turin Winter Olympics. The process was clearly driven by all kinds of concerns, except usability and user experience.
Following a major research project by ISTAT (the Italian National Institute of Statistics) on how time is used in Italian families, the City of Turin commissioned a more specific study focused on the population of the city and its immediate surroundings. The results are being…
Late last week, the European Commission released the European Innovation Scoreboard, ranking the 25 member states across five broad categories that measure different dimensions of innovation performance. By far, the two standouts were Sweden (#1) and Finland (#2). EU press release Comprehensive website (via…
The ever prolific but equally mysterious (who is behind this?) blog Managing Innovative Thinking + Design, published yesterday a series of links to pdf downloads about personas. “Scenarios are a natural element of Persona-based design and development. In Carroll’s words, a scenario is a…
After suffering user fatigue from early experience of mobile applications, it is great to see companies realising that usability is the best way to create a mass market. Read full story
The future may lie in devices that care for an aging population, used to living on their own and with money to spend. Often the needs of an older population are at odds with the design of new gadgets. According to usability experts, the people…
Louis Rosenfeld, the founder of UXnet and the author of the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has founded Rosenfeld Media, a new user experience publishing house. Rosenfeld Media is a publishing house dedicated to developing short, practical, and useful books on…
Core77, the industrial design site, is launching a brand new debate series called Design2.0: Discussions on Design, Strategy & Innovation. The first panel discussion focuses on current thinking in brand and service innovation and will take place in New York on Tuesday 28 February. Entitled…