Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds Editor(s): Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjöberg Bloomsbury Academic May 2017, 288 pages Anthropology has a critical, practical role to play in contemporary debates about futures. This game-changing new book presents new ways of…
Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight by Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell Harper Business November 2016, 336 pages In this pioneering guide, two business authorities introduce the new discipline of Service Design and reveal why trying new…
The service sector needs to break away from old manufacturing-oriented habits and build great consumer experiences into every facet of its business model, write Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell in strategy+business. Experiences matter. Experiences are journeys. Journeys are designed. These statements are fundamental to…
In this free report (pdf, 109 pages), the Service Design Network – in collaboration with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency – has identified five different areas in the public sector that are relevant for service design: policy making, cultural and organizational change, training and capacity building,…
Press release – September 21, 2016 Discovering the New American Dream, an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report sponsored by IKEA US shows that the American Dream, which was once outlined by owning a home with a ‘white picket fence,’ having a comfortable amount of money,…
Invitation to the International Conference on Design & Sustainable Innovation for SmartCities Nice (France) 8 December 2016 On the 8th December 2016, the CITYOPT project will host an international conference on Design and sustainable innovation for SmartCities, at the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, France. An open…
From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read by Kristen Ghodsee The University of Chicago Press 2016, 160 pages Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary…
Mozilla’s Open Innovation Toolkit is a community sourced set of practices and principles for incorporating human-centered design into your product development process. It is a collection of easy-to-use, self-serve techniques and methods that are gathered from industry best practices of innovation. This toolkit is an…
The 100&Change is an international competition and a landmark opportunity for thinkers and designers to tackle critical challenges affecting the world. Michele Visciòla will be one of the panel of expert judges who will select which project is worthy of the $100 million grant. 100&Change…
Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams By Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner Publisher: O’Reilly Media August 2016, 198 pages Design has become the key link between users and today’s complex and rapidly evolving digital experiences, and designers are starting to…
The key to unlocking the insurance industry, writes Richie Hecker in TechCrunch, is understanding behavioral economics. The most successful players in insurance tech, he says, will win by rounding the edges on existing products. “Don’t reinvent the wheel, take what works and make it work…
Ralph Ammer argues that interaction design is based on technological thinking and restricted to profitable applications, and proposes a new direction, which he calls “Natural Design”, centered around biological systems. The principles are: 1. Our designs show our relations towards life and shape them. 2.…
Flaws of the Smart City is a critical, workshop-tailored kit to explore the dark faces of the so-called Smart Cities. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities embed flaws. This kit aims to fix these weak spots or to exploit them to set…
Aggressive drivers are looking forward to sharing the road with autonomous cars as they believe they can cut in front of them easily. This is how Peter Campbell summarised in the Financial Times one of the key conclusions of a wide reaching research project by…
Gillian Crampton Smith (among others former director of the legendary Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and Philip Tabor (among others fomer director of the Bartlett School of Architecture) will direct a new Master in Interaction Design (MIxD) in the Veneto Region of Italy. The MIxD will…
Update: Read also this Fortune Magazine review of the study (as reported by BoingBoing). Institute for the Future, the Caiifornia-based independent, nonprofit strategic research group, releases a new report aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of a new breed of worker in order to create…
The Adaptive Reuse Toolkit – How Cities Can Turn their Industrial Legacy 
into Infrastructure for Innovation and Growth by Matteo Robiglio Policy Paper, September 2016 The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) All over in the world, industrial infrastructure is being creatively re-purposed.…
Last week, the UK innovation charity Nesta launched a new report, Health as a Social Movement: The Power of People in Movements. It illuminates the value and role of health social movements and aims to foster debate, experiments and development of a practice around social…
The Stuff of Bits – An Essay on the Materialities of Information By Paul Dourish MIT Press, April 2017 264 pages The central topic of The Stuff of Bits is the materialities of information. This term often brings to mind the materiality of information infrastructures—…
European Commission There is growing recognition that behavioural insights (BIs) – by shedding light on how people actually make choices – help deliver more effective policies and complement traditional forms of intervention. The Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy (BIAP) 2016 report (February 22, 2016) draws…
The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online Dr. Mary Aiken Spiegel & Grau, August 2016 400 pages A groundbreaking exploration of how cyberspace is changing the way we think, feel, and behave Mary Aiken is the world’s leading expert in…
Can we design a decision aid that gives us health information we need and counters our biases so that we end up more knowledgeable and confident in our preference? This is the challenge that Artefact, together with Group Health Research Institute, sought to address with…
Jasmina Tesanovic (previously) and Bruce Sterling did a residency at The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD (San Diego, USA), working with the students on design fiction and futurism. The residency culminated in a joint lecture about their “Internet of Women’s Things”-based…
The September issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) contains a lengthy essay, entitled Building an Insights Engine, on how Unilever has created the organizational capabilities to “transform data into insights about consumers’ motivations and to turn those insights into strategy.” The article was written…
Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment. Buster Benson has tried to arrange the rather exhaustive lists of cognitive biases (e.g. those mentioned on Wikipedia) into a simpler, clearer…
Sarah Doody explains in a Frontify guest post, which questions you have to ask doing a user research. Why is a user research important? When should you do research? “If you want to design a product that really solves a problem and that people remember,…
Design for Behaviour Change as a Driver for Sustainable Innovation: Challenges and Opportunities for Implementation in the Private and Public Sectors Niedderer, K., Ludden, G., Clune, S. J., Lockton, D., Mackrill, J., Morris, A., Cain, R., Gardiner, E., Evans, M., Gutteridge, R., & Hekkert, P.…
Fashion designers must integrate software, sensors, processors and new synthetic and biological materials into their toolkit, argues Intel anthropologist Todd Harple. “A fourth industrial revolution is set to change fashion, resulting in a new materiality of computation that will transform a certain slice of fashion…
This week Experientia joins our colleagues and peers in Minneapolis at EPIC 2016, the premier international gathering on ethnography and design in industry. The theme for the conference this year is Pathmaking, emphasizing the power of ethnography to create transformative innovation, growth and strategic success…
Future by Design, a Human Centred Design (HCD) and customer-centricity consultancy focused on the African continent, has produced an HCD Toolkit (download link) that’s especially appropriate for an African context, and intended for application where rapid results are needed. Drawing on local narrative, symbolism, social…
The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, Genevieve Bell Routledge, December 2016 536 pages With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of…
Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and coauthor, with Sendhil Mullainathan, of the book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Picador, 2013), talks to Metropolis Magazine’s Avinash Rajagopal on how scarcity and abundance…
On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights by Andi Simon PhD Greenleaf Book Group Press July 2016, 184 pages Abstract Innovation has become such a ubiquitous value, it’s in danger of becoming cliché. Companies frequently talk about it as…
From a Nissan press release (dated August 10, 2016) One profession you might not expect to find at the design table — anthropologist — is playing a key role in developing Nissan’s next generation autonomous vehicle, analyzing human driving interactions to ensure that it is prepared to be a…
The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green New York University Press May 2016, 368 pages > Read online for free Do today’s youth have more opportunities than their parents? As they build their own social and digital networks,…
Bill Selman, Lead UX researcher at Mozilla, starts this most inspiring post with a quote from a former colleague who now works for a major social network: You know, we have all the data in the world. We know what our users are doing and…
Designer Erin Lynch recently interviewed Amélie Lamont, a NYC-based design anthropologist, and the result is quite stimulating, particularly also on the topic gender and racial gaps in the design industry. According to Amélie, “design anthropology focuses on better understanding human value systems. As designers, when…
For those of us who are puzzled about what exactly the difference is between UX and CX, Toby Bottorf, principal at continuum, situates the difference as one of scale: “The difference is one of scale. You’re not designing a thing. You’re trying to design what…
Over the last five years Ericsson’s Networked Society Lab has been exploring what social life in 2025 might mean. How have 20th structures of industrialization been challenged? What is happening with life and lifestyles right now? In what direction are we moving? How are values…
Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman Current (Penguin Randomhouse), July 2016 256 pages Abstract Why did the New York Stock Exchange suspend trading without warning on July 8, 2015? Why did certain Toyota vehicles accelerate uncontrollably against the will of their…