Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
For those seeking the new experience design company Experientia on Google, here it is: www.experientia.com. Google might be the most important search engine in the world, but it takes a (fairly long) while before new domain names make it to the top of the…
A group of museums are exploring how tagging can enable use of museum collections — and foster links between people and institutions. Popular Internet applications that take advantage of social tagging – think flickr and del.icio.us – have captured our collective imagination over the past…
A News.com special report explores how a new generation, technologies return the net to its social roots. The report, which is aimed at a broad audience, is organised in five chapters and provides an insight in the importance of grassroots opinions in the entertainment business…
A consortium of blogging startups wants to give deeper meaning to the Internet by giving people tools to categorise web pages. A consortium of young companies declared their support this week for building categories into web sites that would make them more easily searched and…
From information design to experience design: smart artefacts and the disappearing computer The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and determine our lives. This notion of the “disappearing computer†and the…
Schulze & Webb are working with Chris Heathcote of Nokia’s Insight Foresight Group to develop experimental prototypes to explore personalisation in mobile phones. This project blog discusses their work. There are three overlapping strands in the project: craft, hacking and mass customisation. Craft is broadly…
This is not a story about experience design as such. It is a story about inspiration, innovation, creativity, humanity and life. And I hope that some of it wears off on you, makes you think and inspires you in your desire to become better professionals.…
Creativity is the generation of new ideas – either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets. Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is the process that carries…
The Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) is leading the United States’ charge to develop and deploy emerging technologies that can improve the aging experience in America. Established in 2003, CAST has become a national coalition of more than 400 technology companies, aging services organizations,…
Today I visited Italy’s National Museum of the Mountains (“Museo Nazionale della Montagna”), which is located just a few minutes from my home on a hill overlooking the city of Turin. In fact, the museum re-opened today after an extensive two-year renovation and the result…
My hometown Turin (or “Torino” in Italian) has been selected as the 2008 World Design Capital by ICSID, the international council of societies of industrial design. With this nomination, Turin has been given the go-ahead to organise a series of activities and events to present…
I have created a number of new experience design resources. They are all shared and public, so you can easily add your own contributions. Make sure to update your bookmarks and RSS feeds: Experience design calendar, featuring conferences and workshops worldwide, is now hosted…
Yahoo Inc., the world’s largest Internet media site, had agreed to acquire Del.icio.us, a popular Web site that helps users share links to their favorite Web sites, the site’s founder said on Friday. Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, confirmed a posting on the New…
Potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop due to be rolled out to millions, chip-maker Intel Corp. chairman Craig Barrett said on Friday. “Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop — I think a more realistic…
Mobile Community Design is a frequently updated blog that provides research and design information on mobile communities. It is maintained by Jeff Axup, a Ph.D. student in Information Environments at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and contains some remarkable and detailed comparison charts.…
Bruce Nussbaum argues that Design in India is beginning to take off, as American companies discover the inexpensive but high-grade work consultancies such as Elephant Design and others, and alerts me to the great Design in India website, where you can find links to a…
The Apple website has, perhaps a bit surprisingly, a rather extensive feature on the design consultancy IDEO on its website. A first article entitled “Bigger than a breadbox design” describes how IDEO uses innovative design methodologies and applies them to housing, cities and even governments,…
Nokia today announced its intention to opening several Nokia Flagship Stores in “shopping capitals of the world.” The first Nokia Flagship store opened today in the prestigious Pushkin Square district of Moscow, Russia. In addition to generating sales, a key objective of each Nokia…
The [just published] Cox Review of Creativity in Business has been eagerly awaited by the design industry. Many creatives in the UK (as in other industrialised countries) fondly believe that while manufacturing and call centres may emigrate to cheaper countries, their brand of ‘creativity’ is…
New McKinsey research reveals how the shift from transactional to tacit interactions requires companies to think differently about how to improve performance—and about their technology investments. Moreover, the rise of tacit occupations opens up the possibility that companies can again create capabilities and advantages…
The 2006 Participatory Design Conference will take place in Trento, Italy, July 31 – August 5, 2006. The conference theme “Expanding Boundaries in Design” focuses attention on the multiple contexts in which design takes place and on an expanding range of possible design outcomes, and…
With the help of screen-readers–programs that speak the text on the monitor–and magnifying and contrast-enhancing features, the approximately 260,000 blind and 10 million vision-impaired people in the United States have a way to access the Internet, which has become critical in obtaining goods and services…
Rather than simply providing clear answers to questions, the best design solutions must take into account human emotions, argues MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda in this Business Week article. Read full story
Teenagers are using more technology at a younger age to connect with more people than ever before, according to a study of young consumers prepared by Forrester Research, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based market research company. The report, based on a survey of more than 5,000…
About two months ago, I complained in this blog about the fact that i2010, the EU’s website on digital inclusion and participation, was about the opposite of accessibility and inclusivity. I sent the same message to the cabinet of the EU Commissioner in charge of…
China Daily has an extensive English language report on the Beijing design and innovation meeting “Next Generation Design, Innovation and Creativity for China” (30 November 2005), co-hosted by China Daily and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and apparently a prelude to the Design for the…
A couple of months ago I posted about a very exciting experience design case study by Marc Rettig and MAYA Design on work done for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Maya Design has meanwhile posted a case study synthesis of this project that highlights how…
Industry insiders told a gathering of about 150 people at the Digital Living Room conference that consumers have yet to see a need for home networks and that the complexity involved in setting one up scares away potential buyers. According to Don Norman, a co-founder…
“I have been teaching mechanical engineers the process of design for more than 15 years. Traditional engineering design courses focus on technology and not context. The result is a downstream focus on making a design work rather than on identifying the best design in…
The second day of the Fortune Innovation Forum featured a panel discussion called “Design Matters” with Chris Bangle of BMW Group Design, Minda Gralnek of Target and Richard Koshalek of the Art Center College of Design. Is design the same thing as innovation? Is design…
Being online, being a Buzzer, is a way of life for millions of young Americans across the country. And increasingly, social networks are their medium. Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters…
Exasperation with focus groups, while not universal, is growing as companies look for better ways to get inside consumers’ heads, often assisted by new technology and the Internet. Perhaps the most common complaint about focus groups is that consumers are not honest in front…
A recent interview with Marko Ahtisaari is now online at the Danish Design Center’s web portal. Ahtisaari is the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia and Sebastian Campion talked to him just before his presentation at the Ars Electronica conference in September. Besides talking about…
The industrial design site Core77 just launched a new discussion board forum on design and innovation, moderated by Steve Portigal. The site also hosts a great many other discussion forums, including those on design research and on interaction design. In short, a wealth of material…
The latest issue of trendwatching.com talks about virtual anthropology. “As consumers around the world pro-actively post, stream if not lead parts of their lives online, you (or your trend team) can now vicariously ‘live’ amongst them, at home, at work, out on the streets. From…
Leigh Duncan of Live Path argues in a long post on his blog that user experience is an interface discipline, part of the wider field of customer experience management. It is all a matter of definitions of course, but in our own work, and in…
The UK Design Council launched today Design of the time (DOTT, in short), a £50 million, ten-year initiative to re-design the UK that begins in North East England in 2007. DOTT, which is lead by John Thackara, gives the UK public the chance to help…
Future Perfect is the blog of Jan Chipchase, who works in the User Experience Group at Nokia Research. He defines it as a blog “about the collision of people, society and technology, drawing on issues related to the user research that I conduct on behalf…
Steve Portigal pointed out to me that he just wrote up his own impressions on four user experience related conferences he attended this autumn: – Creative CanUX in Banff in September – About, With, and For (AWF) in Chicago in October – Designing for…
A very insightful story by Geraldine Bedell in today’s Observer explores the latest thinking on the role of design as a means to develop solutions to services, business models and social issues, and the controversy this has generated in the UK. Yet she argues,…