Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Ken Friedman works at the intersection of three fields: design, management and art. At Denmark’s Design School, he works with theory construction and comparative research methodology for design and as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management, he focuses on…
If you had to write your organisation’s obituary, what would it say? Would there be any mourners? Has it made any difference to anyone? Would the world be worse off without it? Would anyone actually notice? Faced with this question, say Klaus Fog and Christian…
It is innovation’s biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives–more features, more function, more power–and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also,…
Abstracts and posters of the first Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC, that took place on 14-15 November in Redmond, WA, are already online. The conference proceedings are also downloadable (pdf, 1.9 mb, 198 pages), be it for a limited time. The EPIC 2005 conference…
Identity 2.0 is a new user-centric and secure concept of identity on the web, rather than the current directory or site-centric one, which is not exactly safe. Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, made a brilliant presentation of what this all means. Dave Gray of…
Can computers help fight obesity? Can technology motivate you to waste less energy? Can communication devices help overcome racial prejudice? Can a virtual agent persuade you to break your smoking habit? Can a mobile phone help you study? Can a robot challenge you to perform…
MuLiMob is an EU financed multi-partner project aimed at using Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity as hallmark to bolster the mobile market. MuLiMob will review and analyse elements to be changed, fine-tuned and solved in order to develop wireless applications that are truly multilingual, from…
China design (cover story) How the mainland is becoming a global center for hot products Motorola’s new mission in China China chief Michael Tatelman on how the handset maker is integrating the country’s consumers and designers into its global strategy Shaping cars for the Chinese…
The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organisations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, IBM is designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear. This article describes the design…
The people at Aria Magazine are nice. A few weeks I posted about this (to me) mysterious initiative. And this is their emailed reaction (freely translated from the original Italian, which you can find below). I can only thank them and wish them good luck.…
DIS 2006, SIGCHI’s biennial conference on Designing Interactive Systems, will take place at Penn State University, University Park, PA USA on June 26-28. DIS has become an internationally recognised forum for design researchers and reflective practitioners. Penn State Professor John M. Carroll just wrote me…
The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) just published the inaugural issue of the Journal of Usability Studies, a UPA peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to “promoting and enhancing the practice, research, ethics and education of usability engineering”. A great positive is that the stories are available…
MIT Technology Review discusses the blossoming field of corporate ethnography as a way to study how people actually use technology and reports on the first-ever Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC), organised by ethnographers at Intel and Microsoft and held at Microsoft’s campus on November…
Michael Bierut of Pentagram argues in the piece on “Innovation is the new black” at Design Observer that corporations are uncomfortable with the term “design” and prefer to call it “innovation.” This provoked a very insightful response by Larry Keeley of Doblin (posted in…
UPA 2006: Usability Through Storytelling brings together engaging speakers from the fields of education, culture, design, technology and entertainment, including: – Steve Denning, “organisational storyteller extraordinaire” – Kevin Brooks, senior staff researcher, Motorola Labs – Nelson Soken, senior engineering manager, Cardiac Rhythm Management business unit,…
UC Berkeley and Yahoo! recently established a joint research laboratory, headed by Prof. Marc Davis, to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. Yahoo! Research Berkeley…
Since recently Nokia publishes Usability eUpdate, a monthly newsletter completely focused on mobile usability and user experience. – June issue – August issue – September issue – October issue – Click here to subscribe. It is developed by the people who are responsible for…
Changes brought about by the internet will be dwarfed by those prompted by the networking of everyday objects, says a UN report. The study looks at how the use of electronic tags and sensors could create an “internet of things”. The report by the International…
A prototype of a cheap and robust laptop for pupils has been welcomed as an “expression of global solidarity” by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The green machine was showcased for the first time by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte at the UN net summit in Tunis.…
This Christmas, tech-peddlers are turning their gaze toward kids, with new lines of grown-up gadgets built for tiny hands. “There’s a shift in need in terms of what a child finds fun and entertaining,” says Jim Silver, editor of the toy trade publication Toy Wishes.…
At the Mandarin and other high-end hotels, new computer systems that connect individual rooms to network servers can now keep track of guests’ preferences and change the room conditions automatically. These “smart” systems can learn whether a frequent guest likes the lights dimmed, the curtains…
“Embedding design into business” is the title of a long article by Roger Martin, dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, that just appeared in the School’s magazine. “Firms everywhere are realising they can jump-start growth by becoming more design-oriented.…
The British Government is working on a series of strategies to put an entirely different dynamic in place to drive the UK public services: one where the service will be driven not by the managers but by the user – the patient, the parent, the…
At the Venice Biennale I was handed a copy of the very trendy Aria Magazine, a bilingual (English / Italian) quarterly magazine for travellers, or as their press release says, “the first magazine about Emotional Geography”. Same thing just now at a Nokia stand during…
The Penske-Wynn car dealership in Las Vegas’s newest casino resort had a problem when it opened in April. About 1,500 people a day were trooping in to ogle the Ferrari and Maserati sports cars parked on the showroom floor, forcing staff to spend as…
Katja Battarbee and Ilpo Koskinen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki provide a social view on user experience in their paper “Co-experience: user experience as interaction”, published in the first issue of CoDesign. “User experience is becoming a key term in the world…
In a half hour audio interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Neil Gershenfeld of MIT says a revolution is on the horizon for manufacturing — that existing technologies and tools can bring capabilities once only held by huge factories down to the personal level.…
More and more B2B companies are turning to experience marketing to woo business customers. “B2B companies, especially in the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries, are looking for ways to immerse their business clients in experiences that tell a brand story. Companies such as IBM…
We clearly have a love-hate relationship with digital technology, a new study confirms. We love how easily it allows us – through e-mail, sending photos and exchanging news and information – to communicate with friends and family, but we hate the slowness, the frustration…
Business Innovation 2005 is the name of the weblog that accompanies this year’s Fortune Innovation Forum, which will be held November 30-December 1 in New York City. Inspired by the event’s comprehensive lineup of discussion topics and speakers (including Chris Bangle and Eric Von…
Plugged into it all From Japanese girls texting their friends to the BlackBerry-armed executive, it’s now who you are connected to, not who you know. But does this mean greater freedom or loss of control? Failed to fly Why do some inventions just not take…
Anna Valtonen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki reflects on the different roles of the industrial designer over the last six decades, as applied to Finland. When the professional practice of industrial design first started to form, the designer was a creator whose…
In this long feature, Rick Robinson, global director of GFK NOP‘s Observational & Ethnographic Practice, discusses ethnography and branding, and argues in much detail how ethnography can help companies gain a true understanding of their customers — including their interactions, thoughts and behaviors, as well…
The new HomeLab allows Philips to test its new home technology prototypes in the most realistic possible way. The research facility, which is located on the Philips campus in the Netherlands, is essential in speeding up the time-to-market for technological innovation. Philips researchers carefully watch…
Rachel Jones of Instrata reflects on the recent “People-Inspired Innovation” conference organised by Chimera* at Adastral Park, Ipswich, UK. When she was last year part of the DTI mission to the west coast of the US (see earlier post), she focussed on the integration…
Men keep their texts short and snappy while women have seized on the mobile as a new way of expressing support and affection, according to sociologists at Sheffield Hallam University. But the researchers [also] found that women also used the ubiquitous mobile to avoid awkward…
As part of the process of opening up its new media production and development to independent producers, the BBC is collaborating with Creative London, ERDF Objective One, Yorkshire Forward, Screen Yorkshire, North-West Vision, and Unexpected Media on a pilot series of ‘Innovation Labs’ in February…
Business Week just published an interview by Liz Danzico (AIGA) with author Peter Morville on his new book Ambient Findability and on what it means to be able to find anything from anywhere at anytime, thanks to ubiquitous computing and the Net. “Intelligence is moving…
Being sent to your bedroom used to be a punishment: now it’s a teen dream. Through personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles, teenagers are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of “connected cocooning”. It’s a phrase coined by music channel MTV to describe…
Chris Luebkeman, director for global foresight and innovation at the innovative top engineering firm Arup, talks in a series of short videos about foresight and innovation. “Foresight is not crystal-ball gazing, it is not about predicting trends. Instead, foresight helps others frame their thinking about…