Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Jacqueline Detwiler explores for Esquire what it means to be an American teenager in 2015. Zac probably started developing memories around 1999, the year Napster upended the music industry by turning songs into sharable files that nobody owned. Or maybe in 2000, the year Google…
Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new $300 million cancer center in New York focuses on the well-being of the patient—even as they move you through the process as quickly as possible. Inside the nearly-finished Josie Robertson Surgery Center (JRSC), the waiting room feels more like a fancy…
Today we received a hard copy of Peeps, a new and impressive magazine that presents itself as “anthropology for non-anthropologists”, aimed at putting “culture and context before events, bringing investigative stories from corners around the world, and offering readers engaging analysis and authoritative insight into…
In this piece, Jerry Cao, Kamil Zieba and Matt Ellis of UXPin dive into four reasons why we recommend a content-first design approach: 1. Design may impress, but content hooks users In the end, users will care more about content, not the design.Sites without substance…
An increasing number of cities are using co-creation platforms to tackle challenging issues like mobility, air quality and urban regeneration too. The Nexthamburg project, for example, was launched in 2009 to source innovative and creative ideas for urban development in Hamburg. MedellÃn, Columbia, has also…
Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy discussion away from job retraining towards job rethinking. This begins…
The non-profit Simply Secure is launching a new series of usability programs for organizations, companies and individuals who are making cryptographic/privacy/security tools. Simply Secure’s mission is to help make privacy tools usable by normal humans, not just supernerds. In this usability program, they employ UX…
Aging the technoscape Do technologies like chairs and walkers have a place in our imagination of the technoscape? How might this image help us to think differently about Mauss’s concept of “techniques of the body” from the perspective of the older adult? Theme issue (Vol…
Research for Designers A Guide to Methods and Practice By Gjoko Muratovski – Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand and Tongji University, China SAGE Publications Ltd, January 2016 280 pages Abstract Design is everywhere: it influences how we live, what we wear, how we communicate,…
Esteban Kolsky is a customer strategist, researcher, keynote speaker, and a consultant (analyst for 15 years, 8 years with Gartner). He believes that research has become a commodity and value has shifted from discovery to analysis and experience applied to better understanding of the issues…
What happens when robot cars meet complex social interaction, like head nods, horn honks, or even road rage? Dr. Melissa Cefkin “is here to teach autonomous cars how to behave”. A design anthropologist based at the Nissan Technical Center in Silicon Valley, Cefkin is charged…
In today’s digital age, consumers expect more from the business they support and the products they purchase. Consumers, Macala Wright writes, not only expect great brand experiences, they believe they’re entitled to them. This is the topic of an interview she conducted with Brian Solis,…
Rinascimenti Sociali [“Social Renaissances”], the first accelerator of social knowledge and entrepreneurship in Italy, launches Foundamenta, a call exclusively dedicated to new business ideas and start-ups generating social impact. Our call is aimed at selecting a maximum of twelve proposals between business ideas and start-ups,…
On the occasion of the U.S. launch of his new book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today, John Thackara sat down with Core77’s Allan Chochinov to talk about the book, changing attitudes about the future, and where we might be…
Guardian writer Samuel Gibbs writes that the second edition of the Blackphone by security and privacy company Silent Circle is a step up in usability and is surprisingly easy to set up and use, even for privacy novices. “The Blackphone 2 promises to be the…
Ayla Newhouse of Adaptive Path interviewed Birgit Mager, President and Co-Founder of the International Service Design Network, on how she got into service design back when it was so new, and how she defines it more than a decade later. Birgit Mager has watched service…
Ana Andjelic writes in AdAge that most legacy luxury brands are failing at delivering service, especially online: The fact that most legacy luxury brands fail to successfully create and deliver service is unfortunate. The business of luxury retail today increasingly involves browsing and shopping online,…
Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini are taking their gloves off and accuse Apple of abandoning the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, proper mapping, appropriate use of constraints, and, of course, the power to undo one’s operations. Apple, they argue in a long essay,…
In September, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to incorporate insights from behavioral science into their programs, in order to help them achieve their policy goals. According to Dave Nussbaum, adjunct associate professor of behavioral science at the University of…
Nudge and the Law: A European Perspective First Edition Edited by: Alberto Alemanno, Anne-Lise Sibony Hart Publishing December 2015, 400 pages Abstract Behavioural sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making since public intervention works much better when…
Digital technologies such as analytics, mobility, social networks, cloud computing and the Internet of Things are making old ways of working redundant and forcing companies to transform. According to Raman Sapra, global head of Dell’s digital business services, the best way to leverage digital is…
Design & The City explores citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city. Central theme is the role of design(ers) to create opportunities and practices for citizens, (social) entrepreneurs and policy makers towards more liveable, sustainable and sociable urban futures. At the round table conference leading…
The Quantified Self By Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus MIT Press, 264 pp. April 2016 Oops, that is confusing: two books by sociologists on the quantified self movement, both entitled “The Quantified Self” and both appearing in April 2016. The first one is by the…
The Rolls-Royce Unified Bridge Design has won this year’s Ergonomics Design Award, presented by the UK Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors. The award recognises industrial design which puts the customer at the heart of the process using their views to generate ideas, develop…
Following the lead of the United States and the United Kingdom, Ireland switched over from analogue to digital television transmission on 24 October 2012. Using the occasion as a jumping-off point, Analogue People in a Digital Age chronicles the switchover day through the perspectives of…
Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice By Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis and Jo Tacchi (RMIT University) SAGE Publications October 2015, 216 pages Abstract This sharp, innovative book champions the rising significance of ethnographic research on the use of digital resources…
Who Benefits From Civic Technology? Demographic and public attitudes research into the users of civic technologies Rebecca Rumbul, Head of Research, mySociety October 2015 mySociety, 31 pages mySociety’s longterm mission is to understand the impacts of civic technologies. But before they can be fully examined,…
Andrea Siodmok, head of the UK Cabinet Office Policy Lab explores how design is helping government think differently about future policy. Design is emerging as a significant force for change in governments across the world. What is it about design that promises to radically transform…
Sociologist Brooke Harrington realized that if she were ever going to understand global inequality she would have to become one of the people who helps create it. So she trained to become a wealth manager to the ultra-rich. Although she never practiced as a wealth…
Paul Mason, economics editor at Channel 4 News and occasional columnist at The Guardian, writes about an alternative smart city vision: the “non-neoliberal smart city” that is currently being developed in Madrid: Instead of seeing the city as a “systemâ€, to be automated and controlled,…
IKEA has undertaken a major research-driven project in 2014 across 12 countries (report here) to explore the subjects of children’s development and play, and young people and parents’ perception of family life at home. This is a follow-up to the 2009 Play Report which interviewed…
Designing the Second Half of Life: Innovation for Aging A visual white paper by Karten Design September 2015 The next 30 years will be a defining era for the American healthcare system, as the number of adults aged 65 and older will double to nearly…
On August 31st Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova from the Near Future Laboratory organised a full day design fiction workshop in Sweden focused on the consumer-oriented Internet of Things. The goal for the day was to create a catalogue in IKEA style for the year…
Watching Closely: A Guide to Ethnographic Observation by Christena Nippert-Eng Oxford University Press, October 2015 296 pages Ethnographers rely on three related activities to conduct research in the field: observation, conversation, and participation. Observing others in their environments and using this data to inform and…
Tim Adams has published a long interview with Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, in the Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian). For nearly thirty years, writes Adams, she has been exploring the effects of digital worlds on…
The White House’s Social and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral science research into the policy making process, has just published its first annual report, which covers just 15 proof-of-concept projects in this first year. Politico’s assistant editor Danny Vinik reviewed…
The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s new national centre for data science, will focus on “drawing value out of the data”, writes Emily Cadman in the Financial Times. According to the Institute’s website, the mission is to “undertake data science research at the intersection of…
Why do some people spend all day in a gallery while others dash around in an hour? Laurent Carpentier wonders what is the difference between the 3.6% of respondents who reported that they had spent more than six hours exploring the Louvre in Paris, and…
Cars that are autonomous most of the time (but not all the time) are dangerous, argues Donald Norman: “Whether you are fan or foe of completely autonomous vehicles, note that it will be decades before we have full automation of cars. One of the most…
Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking By Richard E. Nisbett Farrar, Straus & Giroux August 2015 Description Scientific and philosophical concepts can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world. Surprisingly, despite their utility, many…