Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
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.
Europe seems to have everything it takes to be a hotbed of high-tech innovation: a highly educated workforce, great universities, a solid legal system, and advanced financial markets. Yet it is anything but. Read full story
When the highly respected US newspaper announced last Friday that it was allowing readers to add their thoughts to online editorials (the so-called “wikitorial”), many in the media predicted disaster. Read full story
A recent survey conducted by Microsoft corp finds that workers average only three productive days per week and lays the blame on among other things, unproductive staff meetings. Employees spend an average of 5.6 hours in meetings each week 17 out of 45 hours…
The iPod — with its sublime design, intuitive usability, and unparalleled cool quotient — set a new standard by which all other MP3 players are judged. Four rivals (Whipsaw, Sony, Dell and Innodesign) talk about designing their answer to the iPod. Read full story
In his weekly BBC opinion column, Brian Walden considers spin and how it has resulted in politicians losing control of the democratic agenda.Read full story
A series of articles on the current European debate: Meet me in Eumerica for the best of two worlds [International Herald Tribune, 22 June 2005] Grass roots change for Europe (by EU Commissioner Margot Wallström) [International Herald Tribune, 21 June 2005] Top 10 Euro cliches…
Design Observer A blog by a group of seven design heavies that includes contributors to Print and I.D., a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and Pentagram’s Michael Bierut metacool Diego Rodriguez, an instructor at Stanford’s d.school who works for IDEO, shares his…
Not many marketing campaigns start with a target audience of just eight people. But then, Make Poverty History, the British expression of the global antipoverty campaign leading up to the Group of 8 summit meeting in July, is no ordinary marketing job.Read full story
The advertising business is attempting to revolutionise the way in which it works. Read full story
Technology — from wireless devices to iPods to digital video recorders (DVRs), have given time-pressed consumers more choices and control over what they tune in or tune out — and also split the audience into narrower slices. Advertisers raised spending 10% to $140 billion…
“When I came to Sinai I came to live in the desert. I didn’t know I’d be doing computer photography and going to London four times a year,” Father Justin said. Read full story