Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
There’s more to online social networks than matchmaking, and South Korea’s Cyworld is showing the way. The online service blends homepage building and social networking with a host of other online activities, including Sims-like role-playing. Owned by South Korea’s SK Communications, Cyworld is a cyberphenomenon.…
Buongiorno Vitaminic SpA, an Italian multinational and one of the world’s leading groups in the mobile value-added service (VAS) sector, has signed an agreement for the acquisition of a 100 percent stake in Freever, a leading European company in the Mobile Community sector. The Mobile…
Adaptive Path, a San Francisco based experience design company, organises User Experience Week 2005, a week of thought-provoking workshops on current issues, trends and techniques in user experience design in Washington DC, August 22-25, 2005. Guest speakers include Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, Marc…
The fifth conference on Design and Emotion will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 27-29, 2006. Emotions arise towards people, towards places, towards food and towards things. Emotions influence our well-being as well as our purchase decisions. From a design perspective, we need to…
The Journal of Design Research is an interdisciplinary journal published by Delft University Press, emphasising human aspects as a central issue of design through integrative studies of social sciences and design disciplines. It is an electronic journal aiming to publish articles including multimedia applications…
The U.S. looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right. Read full story
In a world of content overload–with e-mail always pushing information and thousands of web sites pulling us–more people are using RSS readers to cope. The grassroots technology, used for the past few years by bloggers and news junkies, is finding a place in business-computing environments…
Indigenous peoples are using both digital and narrative media to preserve and express their cultures and beliefs. Often this involves adapting media and technology to what the people need, rather than pushing them into a pre-digested or “mainstream” model of what they ought to do…
The Los Angeles Times has a feature story on emotional design, examining how emotions drive decisions and how designing with emotion in mind is becoming steadily more important. The story includes comments by Tim Brown, chief executive of IDEO, design consultant Donald A. Norman, and…
Is it a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. […] Amid all…
Mobile phones have turned members of the public into reporters and camera crews – “citizen journalists”. The media are hungry for their digital images and eyewitness accounts. Read full story
Axel Soojung-Kim Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future and lead blogger of the Institute’s Future Now website sent me some thoughts on how the isolated, autonomous science city has now been displaced by the model of science parks or neighborhoods. The…
Making Meaning: The Business of Experience Design is a book about how people make meaning in their lives and how companies can use this understanding to create more meaningful and successful products and services. In this book, the authors Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel…
Firms everywhere want to revolutionize themselves by turning design-oriented. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as hiring a chief design officer and declaring design as your top corporate priority. To generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways before they can…
Ethiopia, one of Africa’s poorest countries, is spending one tenth of its GDP every year on IT. Over the next five years, the government plans to invest more than $100m (£56m) in public sector computers. It aims to equip hundreds of government offices and schools…
Recent experiences in the struggle against terrorism have shown not only what a critical role the public plays in preventing and responding to crises, but also the importance of a widely available tool the public can use to prevent terrorist acts and to spread danger…
Sick of hearing about design and China? So were Bruce Tharp and Stephanie Munson. They got on a plane and went there. Read full story Related: the top 10 myths and truths about design in China
“I’ve been thinking of running for high office on a one-issue platform: I promise, if elected, that within four years America will have cellphone service as good as Ghana’s. If re-elected, I promise that in eight years America will have cellphone service as good as…
After posting a link to Lele Dainesi’s blog yesterday, here is another Italian-language blog. Carmelo Cutuli (see bio) has a blog about “economy, technology, groups and social networking”. I got a hold of him through LinkedIn, where he is in charge of the Italian…
ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH and AIGA are co-organising the 2005 edition of the Designing for User eXperience conference (DUX2005), focused on how the needs and goals of both users and businesses can be met through design. The conference will take place at Fort Mason Center…
An interesting conference RE:activism | Re-drawing the Boundaries of Activism in a New Media environment (unfortunately, the site’s Flash version is really annoying) will take place October 14-15, 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, which is is co-organised by four prestigious international institutions, is structured…
Starbucks, Swiffer, iPod. Who came up with these ideas? What company executives recognised their value? What team put the manufacturing wheels in motion, and who developed the patent, marketing and branding processes? Welcome to Craig Vogel‘s world. Since the internationally known product-design expert arrived at…
A friend of mine, Lele Dainesi, manages Mash-ups in Italy, a blog on the “rise of cut & paste culture”. It is all in Italian, but insightful if you understand the language. As part of the nicely designed blog, Lele has been interviewing some of…
John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception, just posted a critical comment on how the EU’s innovation and research programmes put an emphasis on tech rather than on people. For instance, the EU’s Information Society Technologies programme contains, according to Thackara, “a lot of tech…
Take a look at these diagrammes and infographs providing insight into the innovation process: its failures, its successes and its opportunities. Interestingly, Business Week identifies customer understanding, customer experience design, strategic design and foresight as the most promising routes for innovation and higher ROI. View…
Music fans may bemoan the crumbling boundary between commercials and song-making, but there’s more to come in an industry turned on its head by portable digital music players like the fast-selling iPod. U.S. advertisers and their agencies are becoming talent scouts, music producers, programers and…
New Experience is a London-based user experience consultancy with associates in USA, Asia and Continental Europe. The company uses ethnographic research, usability testing and information design to help its clients develop innovative product and service experiences that are grounded in the reality of users’ everyday…
Much of the talk around Al Gore’s new Current TV network has been broadly philosophical, like the former vice president’s statement that “we want to be the television homepage for the internet generation.” With its debut Monday, Current TV will be judged by the same…
Oakley Inc. is jumping into the electronic age with sunglasses that play music and work with cell phones as it targets gadget lovers who want more than just protection from the sun. The project involves a collaboration with Motorola and Cingular. Read full story
Innovation is rapidly becoming democratised. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users — both individuals and firms — often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich…
Videos have taken on an exciting if uncertain life of their own, far away from the mother ship that launched them. They thrive at online music sites, they’re sold in record stores, they connect strangers across the Internet. And just this month, speculation was rampant…
San Francisco’s Department of Elections has become very interested in usability issues of voting quipment. Recently, the department had usability expert Scott Luebking come in to provide the staff some basic training on usability and voting equipment. The training included an introductory lecture on usability…
Aaron Marcos, president and principal designer/analyst of Aaron Marcus and Associates, contacted me to point me to some of his own resources on experience design. The website of his company provides a rich overview of case studies and articles, of which I would like to…
Consumers crave “personal meaning” in products and services. To innovate, new methods are being developed to help designers understand the emotions that drive consumer decisions. Read full story
It’s the biggest part of the economy these days, but many companies’ innovation remain focused on products. Service innovation as a discipline is still in its infancy. Here’s why that needs to change. Read full story
Ambient Devices didn’t realise how many different applications people would find for its data-display invention. It’s a lesson in side effects. Read full story
Get creative! The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new — call it the Creativity Economy. Even as policymakers and pundits wring their hands over the outsourcing of engineering, software writing, accounting, and myriad other high-tech, high-end service jobs —…
Business Week is joining the growing conversation about getting creative by launching a new online Innovation & Design portal — www.businessweek.com/innovate — to present the best research and thinking on the subject. It also features a special section on architecture.
High tech’s biggest name are keen to set up research operations in India — and not just because of the cheap labor. Sarnoff is one of many Western tech research outfits that have turned to India for its combination of low labor costs, big…
US teenagers prefer instant messaging rather than e-mail to stay in touch with each other, research shows. A Pew Internet and American Life Project study found online teens are increasingly tech-savvy. Nearly nine out of 10 teenagers say they use the net, up from 74…