Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
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…
A nudge toward participation: Improving clinical trial enrollment with behavioral economics Eric M. VanEpps, Kevin G. Volpp and Scott D. Halpern (University of Pennsylvania) Science Translational Medicine – 20 Jul 2016 Vol. 8, Issue 348, pp. 348fs13 Interventions informed by behavioral economics can address barriers…
A team including the Public Policy Lab (a New York City non-profit) worked with New York City’s Chief Digital Officer and her staff to use ethnographic research to develop the New York City Digital Playbook (available in 14 languages!), a policy and operational guide to…
The pressure to anticipate an audience’s needs and desires is intense—no longer only of concern to business sides of media organizations but a part of the editorial mission, writes Heather Chaplin in the Columbia Journalism Review. Certain newsrooms, including the Times’s, are turning to human-centered…
So close to home. That is what we feel at Experientia when work calls us to France. Just a quick trip across the border, to a country at once reminiscent of, and delightfully different from, our home town of Turin. So when tragedy strikes, it…
LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation Edited by Mariana Amatullo, with Bryan Boyer, Liz Danzico and Andrew Shea Published by Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design July 2016, 360 pages The professional landscape for design in social innovation has reached a critical…
Cultural anthropologist Jamie Lee writes that she is fully on board with UX’s role in the public sector, and that she is an advocate for its unique role in more ethical governance with, rather than just for, communities. She just can’t understand choosing to call…
Business anthropologist Simon Roberts has campaigned hard for the “Remain” side in the UK referendum and is deeply disappointed. He now explores a topic that I too have been arguing for some time now: Politicians, political parties and those in power, he says, “need to…
The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science by Cass R. Sunstein Cambridge University Press, September 2016 In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over…
Can behavioral change address local energy issues, raise peopleâ’s awareness energy consumption issues, and directly support non-profit organizations at the same time? With the Nice pilot of the CITYOPT project, we have seen strong suggestions that it can. It also suggests that the sense of…
The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires, argues Rebecca Lemov, associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. When trying to understand the ramifications of the big-data…
Infrastructure providers are used to focusing on issues of project selection, funding, and regulation. The most successful firms are learning to provide great consumer experiences too. “The consumer experience matters. Infrastructure providers therefore need to tap into the disciplines and insights of great consumer-service companies,…