No amount of hype and starry-eyed Metaverse proselytising can escape reality
The metaverse will be a digital graveyard if we let new technologies distract us from today’s problems
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Climate change and human behaviour
This Focus of Nature Magazine, a collaboration between Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Climate Change, features a broad range of Review and Opinion content on the role of human behaviour in adaption to climate change and mitigation of its negative consequences.
[Book] The Corruption of Co-Design
Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking
[Book] OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes
These are guidelines for any individual or organisation interested in designing, planning, and implementing a citizen participation process. The guidelines walk the reader through ten practical steps, and detail eight different methods that can be used to involve citizens in policy making. This publication is illustrated with good practice examples.
Human-Centered Design: what architects can learn from UX designers
Approaching architectural design with a UX designer’s mindset ensures a more holistic approach to designing the experience of using a building. From the outset, a stronger understanding of the user enables human behavior to dictate the design to a greater degree.
[Book] Service Design for Urban Commons
This book explores the application of service design to urban commons, focusing on the Reggio Emilia Ducal Palace in Italy.
Why paying individual people for their health data is a bad idea
Paying individual people for their health data will widen inequalities and reduce altruism, luring people to sell their privacy. Health data should instead be treated as collective property, and commercial profits should be shared with the public.
Perspectives on the value of ethnography in a future-focused world
In an uncertain world, the safe bet to futures is to explore, identify and invest in what will most likely not change.
User research & Engineering: better together during discovery
Julia Tan and Carolina Aldas of Spotify provide some recommendations on how user research and Engineering can improve their collaboration during the Discovery Phase to come up with more feasible product solutions.
A guide to using user-experience research methods
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To help you know when to use which user research method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
“Democracy depends on it”: Carissa Véliz on privacy and ending data surveillance
“There is nothing shocking or radical about ending an economic practice that has too many negative externalities. We have banned certain kinds of economic activity in the past because of them being too toxic for society. ”
Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare.
How touchless user interfaces can amplify the user experience
A touchless UI has an edge over devices that require touch interactions because decreasing physical contact is helpful in diverse contexts—from food-processing plants to an airport’s self-service registration kiosks.
Harvard Business Review discovers design fiction
By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing. This is counterproductive, the authors argue. Instead, they offer an alternative: Design fiction. A design technique that immerses executives and employees deeply in various possible futures, it uses artifacts such as short movies, fictitious newspaper articles and imaginary commercials to generate transformation roadmaps.
[Book] The Digital Republic
How can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies?
An anthropologist on talking about the metaverse
How we describe the metaverse makes a difference – today’s words could shape tomorrow’s reality and who benefits from it
Are digital IDs a “digital road to hell”?
A report by researchers at New York University warns that biometric and other digital ID systems that are increasingly linked to large-scale human rights violations, especially in the Global South.
[Book] Everyday Automation
The first book to take an interdisciplinary and international approach to understanding how our everyday lives are being affected by automated decision-making.
[Book] Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future
Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future invites us to think forward from our present moment of planetary, public and everyday crisis, through the prism of emerging technologies.
[Book] Design Ethnography
This book advances the practice and theory of design ethnography. It presents a methodologically adventurous and conceptually robust approach to interventional and ethical research design, practice and engagement.
Special issue on machine anthropology
Bringing together a motley crew of social scientists and data scientists, the aim of this special theme issue of Big Data & Society is to explore what an integration or even fusion between anthropology and data science might look like.
Qualitative humanities research is crucial to AI
“All research is qualitative; some is also quantitative”
Harvard Social Scientist and Statistician Gary King
Global Happiness and Well-being Policy Report
In the three years since the last Global Happiness and Well-Being Policy Report, governments have faced a cascade of challenges to the well-being of their populations.
The search engine for UX research
The people behind Research Bookmark, a vast online collection of UX research resources, have - after months of researching and experimenting - released a search engine built just for UX Researchers.
Peter Merholz speaking in Torino
Peter Merholz will be speaking in Torino (Turin, Italy) on Wednesday 8 June. The 9am morning talk will take place in the courtyard of the Circle of Design.
[Book] Expand: Stretching the Future By Design
From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe.
Systems thinking for public servants
How to use systems thinking to drive improved outcomes in complex situations.
[Book] Human-Centered Data Science: An Introduction
Best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of large datasets.
[Book] Behavioral Insights
The definitive introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems.
Behavioral science driven public policy “led astray”
Many behavioral scientists propose and test interventions that attack policy problems by seeking to change individual behavior (adopting an “i-frame”) rather than the system in which they operate (an “s-frame”). Such i-frame interventions, which typically have small or null effects, reduce support from more effective systemic actions (such as regulation and taxation). For this reason, researchers advocating i-frame solutions may have unwittingly helped promote the interests of corporations who oppose systemic change.
Privacy is a collective concern
It’s easy to assume that because some data is “personal”, protecting it is a private matter. But privacy is both a personal and a collective affair, because data is rarely used on an individual basis, writes Carissa Véliz in the New Statesman.
Radical user-centricity, a key RegTech success factor
One of the key success factors of Regulatory Technology ("RegTech") is a commitment to radical user-centricity, according to a new white paper by the World Economic Forum.
System 1 vs. System 2 thinking: Why it isn’t strategic to always be rational
People believe that slow and deliberative thinking is inherently superior to fast and intuitive thinking. The truth is more complicated.
Internet users are ‘poisoning’ their personal data in the fight against online surveillance
With 'obfuscation' or 'data poisoning,' they are redoubling their efforts to prevent companies from tracking them online, writes Aurélien Defer in Le Monde. But these time-consuming and sometimes very complex methods of resistance have not become widespread.
[Book] Livable Proximity
Ezio Manzini's ideas for the city that cares.
Three interviews on UX research and anthropology
The Response-ability Summit, formerly known as the Anthropology + Technology Conference, is a unique two-day event that brings social scientists and technologists together to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the important topic of socially-responsible tech.
Behavioral sciences in the latest IPCC report on the Mitigation of Climate Change
The latest IPCC report on the Mitigation of Climate Change has a lot of meat in it for those engaged in human-centered design, behavioral change strategies, and behavioral sciences.
Experientia seeking a senior business development manager
Experientia is looking for a Senior Business Development Manager with specific experience in either healthcare, energy, consumer goods, and/or the mobility industry, to drive business development in Italy.
Experientia seeking a senior service designer
Experientia is looking for an outstanding Senior Service Designer with specific experience in either healthcare, energy, circular economy and/or the mobility industry.
[Book] Human-Centered AI
In Human-Centered AI, Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives.