Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
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
Niklas Zennström, the internet entrepreneur behind both Kazaa and Skype, spoke to BBC Click Online about how his two inventions came about, and how broadband and wireless devices are shaping his vision for the future. Read full story
Dan Saffer reports in his blog on a talk on service design by Mark Jones, head of service design for IDEO Chicago.
A particularly thorough and insightful article on how the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), based as it is on 19th and early 20th century paradigms, is coping with a changing world. It analyses the simple question raised by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: has…
A collaboration between the Department of Urban Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Architecture Venice (IUAV), the project uses video-equipped cell phones, PDAs, and location-based technology to deliver multimedia walking tours of lesser-known Venetian neighborhoods. The mobile information system will…
This week, the International Telecommunication Union unveiled the Connect the World initiative, with the double goal to push “digital divide” issues to the top of worldwide policy agendas and to connect all communities worldwide by 2015. Founding members include Alcatel of France, the Japanese operator…
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del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with…
The future office will be increasingly mobile, with technology enabling employees to perform their jobs from virtually anywhere, according to Office of the Future: 2020, a research study recently released by OfficeTeam. But greater control over where and how people work won’t necessarily translate…
Italy’s urban vision is not what you think.
The Mediterranean Social Forum opens today in Barcelona. The Spanish city hosts some 280 events, including conferences, seminars, workshops, devoted to the promotion of a public space for communication within the Mediterranean coasts. Since its creation the Forum has opened up new horizons of discussion,…
NextDesign Leadership Institute aims at helping design educators and practicing professionals meet the challenges of cross-disciplinary design and innovation leadership. The latest issue of their journal addresses the role of design journalism in creating the future of design.
The ‘One Planet Living’ concept is aimed at building flagship sustainable communities around the world, including one in London’s Thames Gateway. The community is intended to be built within easy reach of the capital and will be the first zero-carbon, zero-waste community in the UK,…
Raid on Deerfield set out to do with a virtual exhibit that which would be almost impossible in a conventional museum setting: to simultaneously communicate five different cultural perspectives of the same historical event in a comprehensible manner.Read full story
Password is the name of the quarterly magazine of Philips Research. The latest issue is devoted to ambient intelligence and experience design and is now available online. See also this interview with Emile Aarts, vice-president of Philips Research on ambient intelligence and the experience economy.
Only a fifth of big corporations have formal crisis-management plans. In the phrase of the sociologist Neil Weinstein, we are “unrealistic optimists†and tend to have trouble taking seriously those events with a low probability but a high cost. In other words, the very…
Rey Ramsey’s mission of social change starts with the home and leads to the Web. Read full story
The June 2005 issue of Fast Company is entirely devoted to the design. Click on the title of this post to get a full overview or read one of the selected features below. – Strategy by design (IDEO) – The power of design – What…
[…] There is a certain correspondence between Microsoft’s research agenda and the work of the old-time anthropologists, many of whom were funded by colonial governments that needed to understand their native subjects in order to rule them more effectively. The modern version of this knowledge-power…
At Intel, which wasn’t used to having a direct relationship with its end users, the challenges for an anthropologist were not simple. Read full story
The official blog for the Future of Work Community, a membership organisation of HR, IT and facilities professionals. Go to blog
Thomas Friedman’s influential book The World is Flat has been strongly critisised for its bias, simplicity and sloppiness: – The Daily Telegraph (Robert Hanks) – The Daily Telegraph (Noel Malcolm) – The Economist – The Guardian – The Hindu – The Independent – The Nation…
The Participation Age is all about access, built on a model of networked human beings who share, interact, and solve problems, via telephone, internet, and a myriad of other ways of connecting. Their participation creates ideas, information, opportunities, and value-social and economic-everywhere on the network.…
The people who make films, TV and music are trying to work out how to survive in a digital era where the consumer is in control. This was the predominant theme at a conference on the future of digital content held at the Institute of…
The city of Milan is the most wired-up city in Europe, but also Barcelona is very high up in the list, a survey carried out by Milan Chamber of Commerce shows. Read full story
Frontline is the name of America’s best investigative journalism TV programme. It is produced by PBS and fifty of its in-depth reports can now be viewed in streaming video. (Scrolling over the title brings up a short summary, clicking on it gives you even more…
With more than 1 billion cellphones in circulation around the world, the questions of how, when and why people use them have turned from matters of curiosity and conversation into serious subjects of academic research. Read full story
Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking a leaf out of nature’s book when looking for solutions to design problems. Read full story
The first serious attempt to build a computer model of the brain has just begun. Read full story
Last week was not a great time to unveil a new pan-European initiative. Yet the programme is an important source of funding for IT-based innovations in public services. It is aimed not at putting services online (most already are) but in encouraging people to…