Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
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…
Context-based Research Group was established in 1999, the goal was simple – to help marketers and product designers do better work through the power of ethnography. Margaret’s Walking Stick is Context’s perpetual anthropology / ethnography education project. Each month contains a cultural insight from around…
Sun leads way in telework — working not just from home but anywhere. Sun is on the leading edge when it comes to “telework” — a coinage that nowadays replaces the term “telecommuting” because it encompasses not just working from home but working from anywhere:…
At a time when audiences for all performing arts are declining, Cirque du Soleil has taken a particularly moribund segment of the market — the circus — and created an entertainment juggernaut, with a burgeoning record label, a retail operation, and a deal with Carnival…
As China races toward a more market-driven economy, it is building new theatres, concert halls and museums nearly as fast as it is erecting Western-style shopping malls, hotels and business complexes. But the government is also decentralising control of the arts industry, cutting the full…
Information overload infects the enterprise as much as the individual, but companies are more likely to pay for a cure. Read full story
As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organisation continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. This report discusses how the Arc Worldwide’s Experience Planning group (a division of the Publicis group) uses storytelling and…
The BBC News website reporters attending the TEDGlobal (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford sum up their impressions as the gathering ends. Read full story
Science and technology have powered huge leaps in understanding and a fantastic future of novel life forms and advances in biotech beckons. But it isn’t without dangers. Our biggest challenges lie ahead. The science of complexity is perhaps the greatest challenge of all, Astronomer Royal…
Rambling in the countryside has never been so popular, but a conference this weekend, hosted by the Living Streets charity, will examine how taking a daily stroll down the High Street can breathe new life into towns. Read full story
Digital technology is providing people with the tools to produce and share content like never before, and it is set to throw the relationship between them and institutions into turmoil, say experts. “I am predicting 50 years of chaos,” said leading digital thinker Clay Shirky…
A society of virtual “agents†— each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate in their own language — is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve.…