Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
(Wow, it covers Turin!) Beyond Smart Cities: How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate Tim Campbell Routledge, 2012 The promise of competitiveness and economic growth in so-called smart cities emphasizes highly educated talent, high tech industries and pervasive electronic connections. But to really achieve smart cities…
How do we design a resilient socio-technical system, asks Ezio Manzini in Design Observer. “Let’s look to natural systems; their tolerance of breakdowns and their adaptation capacity (that is, their capability of sustaining over time) may give us direction. As a matter of fact, it…
Orchestrating Human-Centered Design Guy Boy Springer, 2013 The time has come to move into a more humanistic approach of technology and to understand where our world is moving to in the early twenty-first century. The design and development of our future products needs to be…
2012 One-to-one Tablets in Secondary Schools: An Evaluation Study (see also here and here) Dr Barbie Clarke and Siv Svanaes, Family Kids and Youth, UK, 2012 Research was carried out between September 2011 and July 2012 and included a literature review, a review of global…
Naace, the UK’s educational ICT association, published a report last year (July 2012), entitled “The iPad as a Tool for Education – A study on the introduction of iPads at Longfield Academy, Kent“. “After a successful implementation at Longfield Academy in Kent and two terms…
Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester thinks the challenge ahead for wearables is in designing for the human brain. “No, I’m not talking about sensors implanted in your brain (although that’s certainly possible, and already happening in research and medical settings). I’m talking about designing for…
The future is rich with sensor-based, animated devices to give us affirmation, coach us and just plain keep us company. Smart Design’s Carla Diana gives a good overview in this opinion piece for the New York Times. “As products become smarter, their behaviors will mean…
Max Levchin [one of the Silicon Valley elite—computer scientist, cofounder of PayPal, buddy of Peter Thiel, Yahoo director, restless entrepreneur, big thinker, venture capitalist, angel] gave the keynote Iat DLD13 in Munich recently, where he argues that “the next big wave of opportunities exists in…
Although I don’t agree with the implicit meaning of this Fast Company title (i.e. that public services currently do not help people – whereas the real issue is the degree of impact), I am always excited to hear the latest updates on Reboot, a design…
For more than two decades Ezio Manzini has been working in the field of design for sustainability. Recently, he focused his interests on social innovation –he started, and currently coordinates, DESIS, an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability. Throughout his professional life…
Dan Hill (of CityofSound, ARUP, Sitra and now Fabrica fame) is not only extremely prolific, but his writing is also very much to the point. His latest Smart City (or better “Smart Citizen”) manifesto is a case in point. Weighing in at 10,000 words, it…
Global Ethnographic is a brand new, general interest, peer reviewed web journal featuring the field research and perspectives shaping our social world. Free and exclusively online, Global Ethnographic is multi-media driven and cross-disciplinary, bringing you the scholarly conversations on daily life as it is lived…
Dr. William Gribbons is director of the Master of Science in Human Factors in Information Design and founder and senior consultant of the Design and Usability Center at Bentley University. An article for UX Magazine describes what he considers to be the four waves of…
Since its inception in 2008, the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation has become the poster child for internal innovation practices. The Center for Innovation focuses on engaging all of the stakeholders in the healthcare system, from doctors to patients to staff, and introducing the design…
The way we use maps is evolving fast, and it will change a great deal more than how we navigate, argues Kat Austen, an opinion editor at New Scientist. “Digital maps offer to enhance and optimise the world, giving us an even richer experience as…
David Halpern, director of the Behavioural Insight Team at the UK Cabinet Office (widely known as the “nudge unit”), discusses research on how subtle changes in the way public services communicate with citizens can yield significant results. “The power of social influence and networks –…
“The material world is a world of social potential. Social scientists should be better equipped to engage with materials and objects through ethnographic, critical, analytical, presentational and collaborative skills. Designers, artists, engineers, architects and curators should be better equipped to work with people using similar…
Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork Richard E. Ocejo (Editor) Routledge, 2012, 272 pages (Amazon link) The only collection of its kind on the market, this reader gathers the work of some of the most esteemed urban ethnographers in sociology and anthropology.…
“The New Science of Pleasure,” a new paper by Daniel L. McFadden, reviews how psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational. Abstract The neoclassical view of consumers as relentless…
From the press release: Today the Interaction Design Foundation, the IDF, has announced its new executive board. The executive board includes Donald Norman; Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research; Ken Friedman, professor and formerly dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University, Australia;…
Festooned with digital accessories that track everything from his heart rate to his footsteps to his sleep patterns, Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott has plugged into the Quantified Self movement. Farewell to gut instinct, and hello to the “data-driven†life: a new path to personal…
This week Danielle Arad interviewed Catalina Naranjo-Bock, UX design researcher, on key UX issues that are trending today in technology. Catalina is a hybrid user experience designer and researcher who has collaborated with creative departments in companies across the US, Europe, Canada and South America…
Videos showcasing two sustainability-related projects are now on Experientia’s YouTube channel. The videos, showing the Ecofamilies and Stories projects respectively, both focus on monitoring domestic energy consumption in different areas of Europe. The Ecofamilies video (in French with our English subtitles) is a feature on…
Rob Van Kranenburg, a member of the EU Expert Group on the Internet of Things, has published a provocative comprehensive global Internet of Things action plan, as input for the inaugural meeting of the Internet of Things World Forum Steering Committee, February 20-21, 2013 in…
Marco Steinberg, who directs the strategic design efforts of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, announced last week that Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab will close in June 2013. Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra to advance strategic design as a way to re-examine, re-think,…
A Sustainable Building Promotes Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Observational Study on Food Disposal by Wu DW, DiGiacomo A, Kingstone A PLoS ONE 8(1): e53856. doi:10.1371 – January 2013 In order to develop a more sustainable society, the wider public will need to increase engagement in pro-environmental…
The Interni Annual Cucina 2012 is out, and this year’s monograph features Experientia’s Prisma design for Toncelli Kitchens. The Prisma was the 2012 flagship kitchen in Toncelli’s presentation at Eurocucina 2012, the International Kitchen Furniture Trade Show, held in Milan. Experientia designed Prisma, Toncelli’s first…
The day is not far off when the manipulation of medical devices will be done routinely by punching keys on a smartphone, writes Charles C. Mann in Vanity Fair, putting an individual’s internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal…
Deutsch’s Douglas Van Praet discusses how focus-group feedback, and the whole notion of the consumer, are misguided and how research should focus on understanding the unconscious and improving human lives. “How [market] research studies are done is at sharp odds with what science now knows.…
From the press release: Intel Corporation released a groundbreaking report on “Women and the Web,” unveiling concrete data on the enormous Internet gender gap in the developing world and the social and economic benefits of securing Internet access for women. To better understand the gender…
Gianfranco Zaccai is co-founder and president of the global design and innovation consultancy Continuum. And he doesn’t like focus groups very much (and neither do we): Why Focus Groups Kill Innovation, From The Designer Behind Swiffer 18 October 2012 The Aeron chair, the Swiffer, and…
Zach Hyman is based in Chongqing, China on a year long ethnographic dive into creative practices of vehicular design among resource-constrained users. After four months in the field, Zach shares with Ethnography Matters his first field update. His observations on low-tech vehicles are incredibly relevant…
Anthropologist Donna Flynn directs Steelcase’s WorkSpace Futures, a 19-member independent research group within the global office design company, that is responsible for “thinking into the future”: understanding the trends shaping the ways we work and sharing that intelligence with Steelcase and its customers. The initiatives…
Now and then somebody writes something that you don’t only wholeheartedly agree with, but that is so deliciously written that it’s a pure joy to read. Ian Eslick, a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-founder of Compass Labs blogs about health and…
Can data heal? Yes, argues Dan Hon, whose type 2 diabetes spurred him to embrace “personal informatics” devices such as the Nike FuelBand and the Fitbit. Yet as such devices become a part of everyday life, a new challenge emerges: the Balkanisation of health data…
A day after the announcement that the Avis Budget Group has agreed to acquire Zipcar, the world’s leading car sharing network, for approximately $500 million, Michel Taride, president of Hertz International and executive vice president of Hertz Corporation, presents his view on the future in…
Two months ago I wrote about what was then one of the first qualitative studies on the impact of tablets in schools: “Carphone Warehouse (corporate site), a UK mobile phone retailer, recently commissioned the Family Kids and Youth research agency to conduct a qualitative study…
This ECAR research bulletin describes an anthropological ethnographic analysis of student practices relating to the use of information technology on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. Using EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) studies as benchmarks, this imaginative research examines learning management system usage and…
In a future where biometrics are measured constantly and interpretation is aided by algorithm, what do we want our health professionals to actually do, asks Bradley Kreit on Fast Company. “As technologies enable us to bypass the doctor and measure our own health continuously, we…
Writer Jason Torchinsky makes a case for a standard user interface for cars: “I know there’s already a number of official and unofficial standards in place — pedal location, use of a wheel for steering, turn indicator stalk location — but cars are getting more…