Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The Quantified Self – A sociology of self-tracking by Deborah Lupton Polity Press April 2016 Description With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has…
Design for Ageing Gracefully Rethinking Health and Wellness for the Elderly: Public Services Asian Insights & Design Innovation, DesignSingapore Council October 2015
Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab Written by Lucy Kimbell Illustrated by Holly Macdonald Published by the University of Brighton September 2015 This report reviews what design-based approaches bring to policy making. It results from an academic fellowship in which the author…
Research on Digital Identity Ecosystems by Francesca Bria, Gemma Galdon Clavell, Javier Ruiz, José Mara Zavala, Laura Fitchner, Harry Halpin D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies) 30 June 2015 D-CENT (a European research project on “Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies”) has published a report – now available…
It’s not enough to just sell a product or service—companies must truly engage with their customers. McKinsey & Company outlines four elements of a design-driven culture, necessary to embed experience design in an organization. Really understanding the customer “The difference with design-driven companies is that…
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than…
The 2015 edition of EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography in the business world, will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil next week. The draft proceedings have just been posted. Here is the table of contents: Bridging Theory…
As we age, we increasingly depend on public services and the community for support. Well-designed public services can greatly affect the lives of the elderly and their experiences of healthcare. Experientia collaborated with DesignSingapore Council on understanding how the elderly interact with public services and…
UX strategist and researcher Alex Schmidt argues that in a world full of security breaches, snooping, and third-party data aggregators, you should know where your users’ data goes. In this article, she explains why it’s time we make privacy part of our product design process—and…
Making a Market for Acts of God: The Practice of Risk Trading in the Global Reinsurance Industry By Paula Jarzabkowski, Rebecca Bednarek, and Paul Spee Oxford Scholarship Online April 2015 Abstract Reinsurance is financial market trading in the risk of unpredictable and devastating disasters—e.g. Hurricane…
Understanding the Connected Home: Thoughts on living in tomorrow’s connected home By Peter Bihr and Michelle Thorne Berlin, September 2015 Available on GitBook We know that connectivity increasingly makes its way into our living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Into our smoke detectors, lights, door locks,…
Our world is continuing to become more complex, more intense and more data driven. Yet counter-intuitively, this is making the human element more and more important. In an interview at Intel’s Transform IT show, Genevieve Bell, Vice President and Fellow at Intel, explains that more…
Big data opens up whole world of insight for designers, but only if we focus on the actual users behind the numbers, writes Maya Nix, the Marketing Content Producer for ClickTale, in this UX Magazine article. “When it comes to UX, before we jump on…
When business anthropologists work with the C-suite of large companies, the clients or employers tend to be the chief marketing officer (for consumer research), the chief strategy officer (for strategy work anchored in an outside-in perspective), the chief innovation officer (for new product development work)…
Over the past decade, Gallup has observed a growing arms race among brands to implement bigger and better customer experience platforms. These systems — also called customer experience platforms, customer experience management or CEX management — aim to capture customer feedback, analyze how a company…
Excerpt (above) – full replay Abstract H​ow do we nurture conditions in which a diffuse creativity can flourish and evolve through collaborative organisations and, in so doing, realise meaningful steps towards a more resilient and sustainable society? In his talk at the RSA (on 30…
Back in May 2015, the Urban Futures team of the Future Cities Catapult (based in London, UK) completed a design research project around cycling. This short project uses film to sketch out some possibilities of contemporary technologies such as wearables and Internet-of-Things, in order to…
Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk Guardian Faber Publishing September 2015 – 288 pages Joris Luyendijk, an investigative journalist and anthropologist, knew as much about banking as the average person: almost nothing. Bankers, he thought, were ruthless,…
A few days ago researcher Ben Kraal gave a talk at UX Australia 2015 describing four years of research done by him and his colleagues on what people do in airports and what airport user experience really means. He just posted his slides and speaker…
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers by Gillian Tett Simon & Schuster – September 1, 2015 304 pages > Extract Abstract From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of how our tendency to…
Our planet is becoming increasingly hot. We are facing climate change, social turmoil on local and global scales, and changing political and economic systems. The symposium “Why the World Needs Anthropologists” (27 September, Ljubljana, Slovenia) will explore anthropology’s applied aspects and potential benefits for society,…
Jesper Christiansen and Runa Sabroe of the Danish human-centred internal governmental body MindLab ask how to increase the effectiveness and legitimacy of public sector interventions – both by creating the actual outcomes that are politically intended, and by enabling a more open approach to governance…
As a Fulbright grantee, Emily Hong spent part of the last year researching the sharing economy in Seoul. One of her main findings? Korea actually has two. The first is small-scale, hyper local and socialist in flavor. This first “sharing Seoul†is largely supported by…
How should companies think about design centricity? For Jon Kolko, vice president of design at Blackboard, an education software company, design thinking can define the way an organization functions at the most basic levels—how it relates to users, how it prototypes products, how it assesses…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to be one of the most far reaching and fundamental shifts in how people interact with technology and their environment since the advent of the Internet. But, the rush to create new commercial prototypes, products, services, systems and…
Aging and the Digital Life Course Edited by David Prendergast and Chiara Garattini Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Publisher: Berghahn Books (June 30, 2015) Hardcover, 289 pages Abstract Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and…
Autonomous cars are based on the premise – similar to airplanes – that the human driver can take back control of the vehicle in case of emergency. But that takes quite a bit of time. Two seconds are not enough, even when the (backup) driver…
Megan Neese is a senior manager in the Future Lab at Nissan Motor Ltd., a cross-functional team tasked with uncovering new business opportunities for the future of automotive. In an article for EPIC, she explains how product companies are undergoing an identity crisis, as products…
Design for Service Innovation & Development: Final Report Edited by y Daniela Sangiorgi, Alison Prendiville, Jeyon Jung and Eun Yu May 2015 DeSID (Design for Service Innovation and Development) is a six-month scoping study funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research council) into the…
Last month the people from Irish UX consultancy Frontend Design looked at the UX revolution in healthcare and how changes in that sector are moving towards putting the customer at the centre of the service. The banking sector is experiencing similar upheaval at the moment…
How to thrive in the next economy by John Thackara Thames & Hudson August 2015, 192pp Abstract Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe how communities the world over are creating a replacement, leave-things-better economy from the…
TV viewing (live, playback and Broadcaster VOD services) dominates the video viewing of all ages; however 16-24s have a more varied video diet, with TV accounting for two thirds of their total video viewing compared to the UK average of 81%. Whilst it’s great to…
Breaking Free from The Lean Startup religion: The Service Designer Manifesto by Tenny Pinheiro Eise Books July 21, 2015 – 52 pages Free on Kindle Abstract Our civilization is facing complex, systemic and scary wicked problems. It is already known that the exclusion for over…
Last week the UK media were suddenly abuzz on how behavioural insights can help government decisions and actions by being able to nudge behaviour in a favourable direction. Apparently it has become a cure-all and is now even used to “slash educational drop-out rates“, to…
Almost all business leaders now acknowledge that they would love to engage in the deep learning that long-term customer observation can foster, but in practice such endeavors are methodically undermined in the fast paced corporate environment, writes ethnographic filmmaker Hal Phillips. As a result, he…
Libraries have moved from being the location for search, access and advice to playing a much smaller role within a much larger information landscape, writes a researcher of JISC, the UK charity that champion the use of digital technologies in UK education and research. The…
Users of the dating app assess potential partners in much the same way as neanderthals did, according to anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University. “Tinder is nothing new,” says Fisher. “It’s just a new interface for doing things the way we…
Far from being a panacea, small loans add to poverty and undermine people by saddling them with unsustainable debt, argues anthropologist Dr. Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics: What’s so fascinating about the microfinance craze is that it persists in the face of…
Almost two years ago, the Photoshop team pivoted to focus its energies and resources on design features and workflows. To be successful, the team needed to understand trends in design and tools, as well as develop connections and empathy to design and designers. Charles Pearson,…
Acclaimed anthropologist Stefana Broadbent leads a new “Collective Intelligence” unit at Nesta, the UK innovation charity, that is “looking at ways to support the emergence of Collective Intelligence to solve complex societal issues”. More concretely, they are studying how patient organisations can use different platforms…