Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Iranian artist Seyed Alavi created a 50 metre long carpet for a pedestrian walkway in the Sacramento Airport imprinted with aerial imagery of the region — a modern take on the “flying carpet.†Alavi’s carpet was created by Ulster Carpets, using imagery provided by the…
Within Nokia’s new well-designed website is a subsite called culture of mobility. It contains a hip presentation of reports, trends and insights on mobile culture. Nowadays mobility represents more than movement: it encompasses all lifestyles, all industries, all forms of media, and myriad environments. It…
When Mariane Polfliet discovered that she had an emergency meeting in a hard-to-reach suburb of Amsterdam last week, there was no need to panic: Within minutes, she used a computer-coded electronic car key to drive away in one of the hundreds of shared cars that…
Two design exhibitions in California — one on Renzo Piano, the other on 2×4 — reveal opposing views on how design firms address the situation of having to essentially create a proxy experience to describe their work. Read the blog post by Lorraine Wild on…
The thirteenth issue of Illywords, Illy’s cultural magazine, is devoted to ethics and responsibility. You can request a free copy of this issue, which is entitled “conscious project”, by sending Illy an email.
There is a transformation taking place in the newspaper business, where top-down, voice-of-God journalism is being challenged by what is called participatory journalism, or civic or citizen journalism. Under this model, readers contribute to the newspaper. And they are doing so in many forms, including…
While any observer can see and feel the changes that mobiles have on our lives, actually measuring the impact is altogether more difficult. There is considerable research under way, and Vodafone’s far-reaching studies are helping to find answers. The new report Africa: The Impact of…
Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ”change the world.” Convinced that it will ”produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,” he is raising $20 billion to make…
Responding to booming demand in Asia and in Europe, Wyse Technology, a venerable maker of computer terminals, is adding new development teams in India and China and expanding its worldwide work force to about 380, from 260. Its profits are recorded in Silicon Valley…
Bob Griffith, editor of Macworld, expresses his doubts on the much-hyped podcasting phenomenon. I couldn’t agree more. Read full story
One of the most oft-asked questions in search is “what’s next.” Yahoo hopes that My Web 2.0 is an answer – according to the folks who created it, My Web is an entirely new approach to relevance based on social inputs such as your group,…
Read this fascinating article on how the automobile industry is reinventing itself, from high tech to high touch, from car design to experience design. The long article features elaborate case study-like sections on Ford’s eConsumer Group, Toyota’s electronic commerce strategy team and Volkwagen’s Autostadt. Make…
What do European companies think about European cities? Here is a sample of the results of a survey with 500 of Europe’s 15,000 biggest companies: The top 10 European cities to locate a business to today (in order): London, Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona,…
Global warming could mean hard times ahead for the Mediterranean, including its all important tourism industry, according to a report commissioned by WWF. Read full story
Lavrans Lovlie, partner in the UK-based service design company Live|Work, has just started a new service design wiki, a collaboratively edited Internet encyclopedia on the topic of service design to which everyone can add and edit entries. Related: Design Council’s web section on service…
Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they’re the underpinnings of…
Mass collaboration on the internet is shaking up business. Read full story
Joseph Pine, co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP and co-author of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage delivered the following keynote address on the Experience Economy and its impact on the arts industry at the Texas Commission on the Arts. (In…
Olivetti, one of the most historic names in Italian industry, was on Wednesday relaunched by the Telecom Italia group after several years out of the public eye. Between 2005 and 2007, Telecom Italia will invest 200 million € in Olivetti, half of which on R&D.…
Newseum, a site billing itself as “the interactive museum of news” has created Today’s Front Pages, a Flash-based interface to let users see the front page of over 435 newspapers across 45 countries. Pointing at a dot will show the current front page for the…
The country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita gross domestic product higher than that of Germany, France and Britain. How Ireland went from the sick man of Europe to…
If television helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the fax machine helped protesters organize during the Tiananmen Square protests, cellphone text messaging, also known as SMS (short message services), may be the new political tool for activists. In tech-savvy nations like South Korea, but…
The British Library recently published “Redefining the Library: The British Library’s strategy 2005 – 2008” and lists as its top 3 strategic priorities: enrich the user’s experience, build the digital research environment, and transform search and navigation.Read more
David Hill, director of design for Lenovo, shares his perspectives on design and technology. Read full story
The first $100 computer is a fitting icon for a country undergoing major changes in the development of its technology, economy and society. As Indian companies increasingly break away from the limitations of handling outsourced services for Western corporations, innovations are likely to multiply and…
From photo- and calendar-sharing services to “citizen journalist” sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way. Read full story
If you have some time, check out the 158 awarded products on the Business Week website (accessible from the “slide show” link). They are neatly organised in fourteen categories: business & industrial design, computer equipment, consumer products, design exploration, design strategy, digital media, environments,…
Their names don’t exactly spark instant recognition: Lenovo, Haier, TCL, Pearl River Pianos, State Grid Corp., and CNOOC. If they mean nothing to you, just wait a few years. All of them are prominent Chinese corporations set to go global and may soon become…
Never heard of brand names like Great Wall, Hisense, Konka, Amoy and Panda? Outside China, few have. But someday that may change. In a policy termed “go global,” China’s leaders have been quietly encouraging Chinese companies for years to set up overseas operations, acquire…
The New Heroes tells the dramatic stories of 14 daring people from all corners of the globe who, against all odds, are successfully alleviating poverty and illness, combating unemployment and violence, and bringing education, light, opportunity and freedom to poor and marginalised people around the…
Being Italian, says the columnist Beppe Severgnini, is a full-time job. “We never forget who we are, and we take pleasure in confounding those who observe us,” he notes. As a matter of fact, Italians are so profoundly perplexing that trying to explain – and…
Like the fashionable width of neckties, business ideas cycle up and down in marketplace importance. The important thing to remember is that although the marketplace buzzwords change, the process of strategic planning, branding and innovation are all still relevant and in fact tied seamlessly to…
The Americanisation of Europe by way of mass marketing is not at all a new phenomenon and, despite all of Europe’s umbrage, its participation has been quite voluntary. Read full review
David Byrne writes about the Bruce Mau show at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, called Massive Change. He finds Mau’s project disturbing for its optimism and especially its utopianism. Read full feature [Also available: David Byrne/Bruce Mau interview in Contemporary Magazine (PDF, 576 kb)]
A long feature on how teens use digital devices to stay connected with each other. Read full story
As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use cameraphones, and why they don’t use them more often. Now, he and human-computer interaction researchers Chris Beckmann and Scott Lederer…
User experience and interface design in the context of creating software represents an approach that puts the user, rather than the system, at the centre of the process. This philosophy, called user-centred design, incorporates user concerns and advocacy from the beginning of the design…
Some of the world’s biggest advertisers, including Microsoft and Anheuser-Busch, are increasingly turning to electronic word-of-mouth advertising campaigns as they seek inexpensive, provocative and entertaining ways to reach new customers. Read full story
This article describes critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process involving participatory design work aimed at transforming a local context while producing an instructional design that can be used in multiple contexts. Download article (pdf, 1 mb)
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Programme, launched in 2004, works with the Forum’s networks and communities (such as business leaders, NGOs and policy-makers) to develop scenario-based foresight studies. It recently produced a first guide to the global risks to the world’s economic outlook.