Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
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…
Over many years, the leaders of SAS Institute have distilled a set of principles for getting peak performance from creative people. Among them: Value the work over the tools, reward excellence with challenges, and minimize hassles. A company’s most important asset isn’t raw materials, transportation…
Does design have a role in implementing social policy and addressing political challenges? In an informal debate on “Design and Social Policy”, the July meeting of AIGA Experience Design in London weighed up just how far designers should be engaged in the political practices of…
Mobiles are becoming “media channels” as music, games, gambling and adult content clamour to make the industry worth $42.8bn by 2010. Read full story
That’s due to “near-monopolists” in many areas, says futurist Mark Anderson, whose newsletter is read by the likes of Gates and Dell. Mark Anderson just might be one of the most influential technology futurists around. His weekly newsletter, Strategic News Service (SNS), is widely read…
The Ambient Experience suite uses Philips’ lighting and consumer electronics to create a welcoming and patient-friendly environment for children undergoing medical scans. Featuring a Philips Brilliance CT (computed tomography) scanner in a room with curved walls, it lets young patients choose a theme – or…
Blogger Grant McCracken has posted a nice tale about doing ethnography at McDonald’s to figure out why people order smaller drink sizes in the drive-thru than inside. And in the process, provides a nice concise explanation of a research approach. Read full post (via Customer…
CEO Gerard Kleisterlee tells how an emphasis on smart design pushes innovation, makes happy customers — and boosts the bottom line. Read full interview (via Brian Regienczuk)
The Pattern Map offers a visual guide to the sustainability patterns that provide a framework for developing a Conservation Economy: an ecologically restorative, socially just and reliably prosperous society. The fifty-seven patterns are adaptable to local ecosystems and cultures, yet universal in their applicability.
Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you’re going to do next. At least, these are the capabilities of 100 customised phones given to students…
The UK’s largest charity for deaf people and a design magazine are launching an exhibition of futuristic hearing aids to make them more popular. The show, called Hearwear, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London this week. Read full story (Related story: The…
The enormous growth of mobile phones in Tanzania is helping to close the digital divide between Africa and the West. Mobile phones seem to have created a new sector of the economy, and some now wonder if the emphasis on the internet when looking at…
France Télécom this month offered up its latest version of convergence by tacking on a few useful services to its Livebox home networking product, a “triple play” service combining Internet, telephone and television service. The most interesting of the new “Liveservices” from the company is…
Harvard Business School Publishing has some articles available as (paying) downloads describing how experience design and the user-centred approach can lead to innovation. Let the Users Take the Lead – May 15, 2005 Interview with Eric von Hippel, the head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship…
It seems so obvious: let people age the way they have lived. Today, finally, it’s beginning to happen. From upscale residences in California to family-size nursing homes in Mississippi, living facilities for the elderly are undergoing an architectural and cultural makeover: big, sterile institutions are…
On a blog called sparklebodyspray.com, the pastel geometric images of four faceless girls emphasize the four authors, code-named Vanilla, Tropical, Rose, and Peach. Vanilla and her crew aren’t people at all. They’re the names of four perfume sprays, targeted to teens, created under the Secret…
Moving beyond recycling to preventing garbage itself as the next generation of social and civic responsibility, Seattle Public Utilities is launching an initiative called Wasteless in Seattle. With the long-term goal of “zero waste,” the city hopes to drastically reduce the need for landfills and…
Human-centred design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay [published in…
thoughtless acts? is a book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO that invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them. These “thoughtless acts” reveal how people how people behave in a world not always tailored to…
The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx’s vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx’s view of globalisation lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the…
Somehow I attributed the first experience design podcast to the Experience Journal (see post). In fact, the honour goes to Small Business Branding. But they both interviewed the same person, Kyle Coolbroth. “On today’s show, my guest is Kyle Coolbroth, the man with the coolest…
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips (see previous post) also pointed me to the ambient experience info on Philips Medical. “Imagine if you could break down the barriers that can make a visit to the hospital an intimidating experience for patients,…
IDEO’s David Kelley is building a “D-school” that aims to put students in direct contact with the people they’re designing for. An interview on the D-school as a B-school with Bruce Nussbaum. Read full story (via Metacool)
If we believe what we read, not only the South China tiger and the Cross River gorilla but the Japanese and Italians are heading for extinction. Doomsday projections make good headlines – we offer a few here – but the fact is that we would…
Brian Regienczuk, a senior project manager & consultant at Philips, commented on some of my previous Philips posts and pointed me to the very informative sites on the “Future of Shopping” (see link below) and “Ambient Intelligence“. The “Future of Shopping” site, which argues for…
Three French companies, with an assist from the Finns and the Swedes, have combined their ingenuity to come up with a digital pen-and-paper system called PaperPC that, broadly speaking, digitises anything you can write with a pen. What makes it different from similar systems is…
You can outsource product design to a third party, which in turn may use big chunks of external intellectual property; you can outsource physical manufacturing; and now, you can even outsource your research and development. […] What’s left? Not to worry, many say: The companies…
Five years ago, at Swedish giant financial services giant Skandia, Lief Edvinsson became the world’s first director of intellectual capital. He quickly set out to revolutionise the corporate accounting with a new framework for measuring intangibles: the company’s valuable “soft stuff” such as customer relations…
First there were TVs. Then came PCs. Now, mobile phones are becoming the ‘third screen’ for viewing video. Read full story
“Experience Architecture†unites narrative content and media technology to offer a dynamic new approach to the built environment. This design orientation focuses on the guest experience, and highlights the potential for architects to integrate media, information, and other forms of content into their building vocabulary.…
The most powerful thought leader and business development conference in Silicon Valley has started and AO readers can watch it live on the web. Go to website
David Kelley, founder of industrial-design firm IDEO, is making headway in his dream of transforming design departments from that quirky corner where everyone wears clunky shoes to a central part of the product development team. Read full story Listen to webcast
Speaking at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University, futurist George Gilder predicted a harrowing future for humanity. TV will die, he said, and be replaced by blogs. Read full story Listen to webcast
WWF and SustainAbility, an independent think-tank, have recently released a new report revealing the strength of links between corporate responsibility practices and government lobbying and public policy activities of major global corporations. The report, Influencing Power, ranks the world’s top 100 companies on the transparency…
Humans attempt to do many things at the same time, such as driving and chatting on the phone, or working and listening to music, and now research suggests why such multitasking may be possible: the brain appears to have its own control centre. Studies indicate…
This podcast focuses on customer experience design and the impact it has on business. A first for experience design? [Update: it turns out that Kyle Coolbroth has been featured before in a podcast. So this is not the first experience design podcast] Go to website…
For more than 40 years, Futuribles has been an independent non-profit centre for prospective studies and foresight. Its overall aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary world. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, Futuribles explores current issues, the world’s possible futures (futurs…
It’s become popular to disparage focus groups. What people often hear is that research is bad, or people who rely on it are lacking in leadership ability. Most of the people making these disparaging comments about marketing research are also usually trumpeting the importance of…
With Office Communicator 2005, an IM client for business users, Microsoft is leading the charge to make ‘presence’ ever-present, and not just in instant-messaging. But is presence really progress? Read full story
India’s approach seems quite similar to that of the West — lay out some semi-official ground rules, then encourage (but not require) builders to meet them. China’s approach, conversely, seems to be more revolutionary than evolutionary — build sustainable cities from the ground up, as…