Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
It is widely acknowledged that patients and their families should be deeply involved in the design of and decisions about the health care that the former receive — and that it is integral to achieving high quality and patient satisfaction. But delivering such “patient-centered care 
This week, the ITC-ILO officially launched the Experientia-designed website Compass: the right direction for learning and training. The site is a toolkit comprising 60 methodologies, with the aim of diffusing learning and training knowledge and tools within the ITC-ILO organisation. Experientia conducted a complete redesign…
Tablets for Schools, a UK campaign organisation that seeks to “prove the categorical case of tablets in schools”, has just published its second qualitative research report. “The report summarises findings from an evaluation study that is looking at the feasibility and educational impact of giving…
Intel’s Arduino-compatible open-source Galileo development board was launched today in Italy at Rome’s Maker Faire. Rightfully so, as the initiative has such deep Italian roots. In 2004, a group of programmers, students and teachers at the highly regarded Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy) developed the…
More and more, we live our lives according to the unknown auspices of machine codes, writes Frank Swain. “Our lives are influenced by technologies not simply as objects but invisible systems that surround us, and whose architecture shapes the patterns of our lives. To live…
“The people using big data don’t presume to peer deeply into people’s souls,” argues David Brooks in the New York Times (in an April 2013 column). “They don’t try to explain why people are doing things. They just want to observe what they are doing.”…
Looking at yet another tweet and another post about the Quantified Self, I started reflecting this morning on the Silicon Valley-driven fascination with the quantification of one’s own activities, body and habits. The Quantified Self movement is portrayed as the nec-plus-ultra of objectivity that will…
Sean Young, a behavioral psychologist, a family medicine professor and director of innovation at the center for behavioral and addiction medicine at UCLA, addresses the challenge of technology entrepreneurs on how to engage people and change behaviors. Fortunately, he says, “there is a science behind…
Two new articles on Ethnography Matters: Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and she was a Visiting…
People-Centered Innovation: Becoming a Practitioner in Innovative Research by Pedro Oliveira Biblio Publishing, 2013 194 pages [Amazon] Written with a general audience in mind, People-Centered Innovation focuses on innovation research in corporate settings. Starting with a biographical standpoint, it describes the author’s transition from the…
Delivering Design: Performance and Materiality in Professional Interaction Design is the title of the PhD dissertation Elizabeth Sarah Goodman defended last year to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. It is now available online. Abstract Interaction…
Lauren Pope of Nokia writes that there are three things to think about if you want your devices and your brain to sing in unison: mindfulness, attention and metacognition. The video is cute and well-done, but doesn’t match the three things in the text, as…
Simon Roberts, the highly engaging, smart and easily approachable chair of the EPIC conference last week, was so absorbed with all the logistics that he didn’t find the concentration to speak his mind during the conference. Now that the conference is over (and well organised…
While “Big Data†is causing excitement in the IT and business sector, the practice and concept of data analysis is not unfamiliar to those coming from a UX research background, writes Michael Lai in UX Magazine. The intersection of business intelligence and user-centric design therefore…
Can information and technology improve the quality of life in cities? That seems a pretty fundamental question for the Smarter Cities movement to address. There is little point in us expending time and money on the application of technology to city systems unless we can…
Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of the New York Times, argues that too many products use complexity to mask their flaws. “Designing self-explanatory products is even more important — and more challenging — in the digital era, when devices like phones and computers are becoming ever…
While you are browsing online, you could be squandering memories — or losing important information, according to Swedish research. Contrary to common wisdom, an idle brain is in fact doing important work — and in the age of constant information overload, it’s a good idea…
This week, business anthropologists from all over the world descended on the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference at London’s Royal Institution, the historic site where Michael Faraday first demonstrated the power of electricity, reports Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. Over three days, practitioners discussed…
MindLab, a cross-ministerial innovation unit in Denmark, hosted the seminar titled ‘How Public Design?’ for the second time on 2 and 3 September. This event gathered a distinguished group of decision-makers, researchers, experts and consultants of social change. As the previous event, the theme itself…
The future of design is a broad and slippery subject, one examined number of designers and critics at the recent Alvar Aalto Design Seminar in Jyväskylä, Finland. “With a distinct focus on product and furniture design – as befitting to the festival’s namesake – Finnish…
The secret to robots with better social skills? Exploiting human nature. Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor of BoingBoing.net, explores “how [designers can make] robots trick you in loving them” for the New York Times Magazine. “In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone:…
This month’s theme of EthnographyMatters, edited by Nicolas Nova, is about the relationships between ethnography, speculative fiction and design. “In design circles, the current interest in “design fiction†is geared towards exploring how prototyping and storytelling can benefit from each other. Design fiction use standard…
Both studies are about the USA market. Location-based services (Released on September 12, 2013) The role of location in digital life is changing as growing numbers of internet users are adding a new layer of location information to their posts, and a majority of smartphone…
We, citizens of all cities, take the fate of the places we live in into our own hands. We care about the familiar buildings and the parks, the shops, the schools, the roads and the trees, but far more about the quality of the life…
Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice Editor(s): Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 304 pages Design is a key site of cultural production and change in contemporary society. Anthropologists have been involved in design projects for several decades but only recently a…
In this article for UX Magazine, Avi Itzkovitch explores the opportunities the Internet of Things presents to designers. Because the smart fridge is the cliché people usually refer to when discussing the Internet of Things, he uses this mythical smart fridge of the future, to…
Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between Facebook Users and Quitters Stefan Stieger, Christoph Burger, Manuel Bohn, and Martin Voracek. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. September 2013, 16(9): 629-634. doi:10.1089 Published in Volume: 16 Issue 9: September 12,…
EPIC 2013, the conference on “ethnographic praxis in industry”, kicked off in London today, with experts from around the world gathering for the three-day conference exploring ethnographic investigations and principles in the study of human behavior as they are applied in business settings. This (Monday)…
Taiwan meets Italy this week, in a series of workshops and company visits hosted by Experientia for Taiwanese business people. The 15 participants are from a diverse range of roles, from secretary to CEO, and a wide range of industries, including IT, appliances, car accessories,…
Understanding the experience of using an object depends on understanding the context of use, argues Jeff Doemland in UX Magazine. However, “The prevailing understanding of user and experience–the understanding behind my clients’ preoccupation with the properties of the tools they provide their customers–grows out of…
One would expect that listening to your customers’ needs and wants is a basic prerequisite for any business active in a competitive industry. It also is understandable that no business can satisfy all of its customers’ needs nor always meet the basic needs for most…
Last week Joeri van den Steenhoven, attended the
Click on image to view slideshow Recently, Fast Company, Dezeen Magazine and Wired have featured articles about UNStudio’s design for the Nippon Moon, a Giant Observation Wheel (GOW) to be located in Japan that could rival the London Eye and Singapore Flyer. To make the…
Brigitte Jordan, the legendary corporate anthropologist, once described as one of the “godmothers†of design ethnography, has posted four new papers on her website: The Double Helix of Learning: Knowledge Transfer in Traditional and Techno-Centric Communities Draft. Comments appreciated. In this paper I formulate a…
Om Malik of GigaOm argues that the cambrian explosion of mobile apps and cloud-based services as well as the exponential growth of data has led him to a very simple understanding: user experience is part of business logic. “The emergence of the cloud has made…
Media Evolution The Conference is an international conference organized annually in Malmö, Sweden. The event focuses on factors that are affecting our society, with a media industry angle to it, exploring who sets the agenda, what changes the playing field and how we all can…
The multiplexed metropolis Enthusiasts think that data services can change cities in this century as much as electricity did in the last one. The Economist – in a piece written by Ludwig Siegele, online business and finance editor, argues that they are a long way…
Rebecca Solnit writes – in an excellent piece – that she feels as though she is in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway. “Previous technologies have expanded…
Pew Research Center found that 86 percent of surveyed adult Internet users in the U.S. have made efforts to obscure their “digital footprints†— which could include simple measures like clearing cookies in your browser or something more involved like encrypting your email, writes Ingrid…
This week, the ITC-ILO, a United Nations affiliate, officially launched an Experientia-designed mobile site to promote mobile learning tools within the organisation. The mobile site is an internal communications tool to showcase best practice mobile learning use within ITC-ILO, and it has been designed to…