The psychology of ownership
"What’s mine is mine: unpicking the psychological reasons people like to own things" is the title of a highly recommended article by Claire Murphy of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Behavioural insights handbook
The objective of this guide is to provide a practical, step-by-step outline on how to run a simple BI project.
Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science
To live up to its mission of understanding the representational and computational capacities of the human mind, cognitive science needs to broaden the linguistic diversity represented in its participants and researchers.
[Book] An anthropology of futures and technology
This book examines emerging automated technologies and systems and the increasingly prominent roles that each plays in our lives and our imagined futures.
[Book] Co-Cities
A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services.
[Book] Cloudmoney
In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash.
Book is also available in German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese & Korean
[Book] Voices in the Code
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way, and draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic way.
[Book] The Human Side of Innovation
PepsiCo’s award-winning chief design officer reveals the secret to creating life-changing innovations: putting human needs at the center of any design process.
2022 HAI Fall Conference on AI in the Loop: Humans in Charge
At the "AI in the Loop: Humans in Charge" conference, which took place Nov. 15 at Stanford University, panelists proposed a new definition of human-centered AI – one that emphasizes the need for systems that improve human life and challenges problematic incentives that currently drive the creation of AI tools.
Social science research for a French home improvement retailer
Leroy Merlin is a French-headquartered home improvement and gardening retailer. Its Leroy Merlin Source (LMS) platform aims to create and share original knowledge on new ways of living and inhabiting spaces by expert researchers, professionals and stakeholders.
To understand uses of personal data in the present, people draw on the past and imagine the future
The collection and analysis of data about us now occurs across many aspects of everyday life, but how do people come to understand these complex processes? Drawing on Living With Data research, Susan Oman, Hannah Ditchfield and Helen Kennedy show that people’s understandings of data uses are based on past experiences and predictions about the future.
Interviews in the social sciences – A Nature Reviews Methods Primer
In this Nature Reviews Method Primer, Eleanor Knott, Aliya Hamid Rao, Kate Summers & Chana Teeger off the London School of Economics focus on the stages and challenges of designing and conducting an interview project and analysing data from it, as well as strategies to overcome such challenges.
Ethnographic research in data centers
Data centers are destroying the natural world, writes anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate in Wired. But is the cloud an inherently unsustainable paradigm? He foresees three possible pathways for remaking the cloud into something more sustainable for future generations.
Nielsen Norman Group on the usability of AR
AR features in mobile apps are plagued by usability issues such as poor discoverability and findability of items with AR, low-visibility instructions, or vague icons and signifiers.
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
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.