Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In her work anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster applies anthropological principles to the study of the university’s libraries and their users. By focusing on the work that people are doing inside these spaces, they can identify needs and imagine new solutions to address those needs. “My…
Smart Design’s Dan Saffer discusses on Fast Company on how we should interact with the automobiles of the (near) future: “What will this feel like, riding in our new robot cars? If the experience of being a “driver†in our new cars isn’t designed well,…
Longtime political operative Joe Trippi advocates a bottom-up, people-centered politics, and cheers the innovations of Obama 2012, saying they restored the primacy of the individual voter. “New technologies can manipulate, empower, or do both. There will be plenty of actors in both politics and business…
The UK government’s deficit reduction plan may fall short of its targets, prompting speculation that austerity measures will have to continue into the next parliament. Local government officers who have already seen substantial cuts are now looking at a further 20%, and casting about for…
BBC News has published a 5 minute video feature on Cambridge University’s Design Centre where they test how elderly people use technology. Must-have modern gadgets are designed by young people with young people in mind – that is the view of Ian Hosking, who works…
Recent reports from McKinsey’s iConsumer Global Research Initiative: Moving from “mobile first†to “touch first†December 2012 (published on the EconomistGroup site) Already, more than a third of the time people spend web browsing, using social networking sites, and using e-mail/messaging software is on mobile…
A few weeks back, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) issued “Understanding Electric Utility Customers—Summary Report: What We Know and What We Need to Know.” One simple statement and the rest of this column is digression: there’s a lot we don’t know about how customers…
Samsung is doubling down on technology investments in Apple’s backyard, including two new R&D buildings in Silicon Valley that will house 2,000 staff and a recently announced startup accelerator. Leading this effort is Young Sohn, who started at Samsung in August as president and chief…
On 26 November MindLab, the Danish citizen-centric governmental innovation unit, invited Charles Leadbeater for its morning lecture series. Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and creativity, talked about scaling and system innovation in public services. MindLab is a cross-ministerial innovation unit which involves citizens and…
Yesterday I plugged Connecting, a short film that explores trends in UI, Interaction & Experience Design. When Mark Rettig watched the video, he said he would “hesitate to refer friends and family to watch it as an explanation of some of this field, because they’ll…
Bryan Boyer is the Strategic Design Lead at SITRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund. SITRA is a prominent example of a public institution that has embraced a design approach to exploring social innovation challenges. Helsinki Design Lab, a platform for advancing strategic design, is illustrative of…
Companies today are increasingly tying people’s real-life identities to their online browsing habits. Research conducted by the Wall Street Journal on the practices of more than a thousand websites shows that the border between our public and private lives is blurring still more. “The use…
The idea of a unified reputation currency is starting to take hold online, writes Josh Klein in the blog of the Harvard Business Review. “With broad agreement that reputation is a form of value, and various mechanisms already existing to score people and institutions on…
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her four-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s Ethnography Matters, she showed how…
Business Technology 2020 Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of data. These are some of the responses IT leaders gave to us when we asked, “What will business technology look like in 2020?†In 2020, tech experts say, computers could learn…
Also the New York Times is turning up the cyborg theme, but luckily more intelligently than CNN. All the technology and internet use has changed how we interact. But are we also changing what we are? The New York Times put that question to three…
Brand experience agency edenspiekermann_ and Volkswagen’s Service Innovation Team explored what it takes to define a service that would play a relevant role in people’s lives. “We started with: Who are the people that use carsharing? How can we expand the service to exceed their…
Though hats have long gone out of fashion, the custom should be a guide for how we adapt to the increasing pervasiveness of personal technology. It’s high time, writes Nir Eyal, that we started doing with our digital devices what well-mannered men did with their…
CNN features a long article about the unusual new profession of the cyborg anthropologist – featuring a robot hand photo for good measure. But reading the article we find out that “cyborg anthropology is the study of the interaction between humans and technology, and how…
The 18 minute “Connecting” documentary, created by Bassett & Partners for Windows Phone Design Studio, is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry’s thought leaders. As the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is…
The Warwick Business School and the UK Design Council have launched the world’s first Behavioural Design Lab. The lab aims to bring together the power of design with cutting edge scientific research that Warwick Business School’s burgeoning Behavioural Science group is discovering. Behavioural Design Lab…
Richard Ingram has posted the transcript of his talk on data visualisation at CS Forum 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Chris Brooker recently ran the Service Design for Innovative Banking workshop at the World Usability Day conference in Silesia, Poland, during which he explored how service design techniques can produce unique service ideas for the rapidly evolving banking sector. Brooker has now summarized the content…
The use of smartphones is becoming widespread among all sectors of the population. However, developers and designers do not have access to guidance in designing for specific audiences such as older adults. This study by Roxanne Leitão of Fraunhofer Portugal investigated optimal target sizes, and…
This week London hosts a jamboree of computer geeks, politicians, and urban planners from around the world. At the Urban Age conference, they will discuss the latest whizz idea in high tech, the “smart city”. “But,” writes Richard Sennett in The Guardian, “the danger now…
Ethnography can be used to inform important health and policy decisions. But there are few public case studies that illustrate the value of ethnography for this specific context. When Erik Bigras of EthnographyMatters learned about The Asthma Files, a project where ethnographers were not only…
The war between natives and immigrants is ending. The natives have won, argues Oliver Joy on the CNN website. It was a bloodless conflict fought not with bullets and spears, but with iPhones and floppy disks. Now the battle between the haves and have-nots can…
Clare Brass is the team leader of Sustain at the Royal College of Art in London, where she presides over a radical initiative to make sustainability a core issue for all students, whether they are studying architecture, textiles, visual communications or industrial design. Rather than…
John Pavlus reflects in the MIT Technology Review on a short essay by Gary Marcus in the New Yorker about the ethical quandaries raised by Google’s driverless car. “The real problems that artificially intelligent cars will bring with them,” he says, “aren’t the grand techno-ethical…
In the fast-evolving world of connected cars, CTO Paul Mascarenas is bringing Detroit and Silicon Valley together to chart Ford’s path into the future. Brian Cooley of CNet interviews him during a walk through Ford’s advanced research facilities.
One of the more innovative studies to come along at Intel in regards to user experience and the Ultrabook is Daria Loi’s global survey of touch interface usage. Dario Loi, who is UX Innovation Manager at Intel’s PC Client Solution’s Division, presents in this video,…
The full service design agency Pars Pro Toto in Ghent, Belgium built the “Wereld van Nestor” [Nestor’s World], a social design tool meant to help local governments in Flanders create a better world for their elderly citizens. The tool is built on 10 personas and…
As the sharing economy picks up momentum, its reach has become global. In cities and towns around the world, people are creating ways to share everything from baby clothes to boats, hardware to vacation homes. There are also groups emerging that consciously identify with the…
Working together with Marco Visconti architects, Experientia has created a forward-looking skyscraper concept, addressing the theme of global warming. The Visconti/Experientia skyscraper was created for the eVolo 2012 Skyscraper Competition, which encourages designers and architects to redefine skyscraper design through innovations in technology, materials, programs,…
The series of research projects on tablet use in schools (see here, here and here) now also has an Android study. A small research project by Marie Bjerede and Tzaddi Bondi, equipped a 5th grade class of 27 students in Portland, Oregon (USA) with 7-inch…
Post by Experientia UX researcher Anna Wojnarowska: The first MedLove conference, a UX and healthcare summit sponsored by Razorfish, took place this Friday in Berlin. MedLove gathered professionals from around the world discussing the challenges waiting for the researchers and designers approaching the healthcare environment.…
Big Data is the subject of a forthcoming glossy photo book, a smartphone application for personal data analysis and comparison, and an interactive version of the book for the iPad, reports Steve Lohr on the New York Times Bits blog. The Human Face of Big…
The language of learning today is full of references to “softness†and “openness.†Software, soft skills, soft performance, and the softening up of school knowledge go hand-in-hand with open source, open access and open educational resources in much current thinking about networked learning. How might…
Our friends of Adaptive Path have uploaded (nearly) all videos of UX Week 2012, the premier user experience design conference that took place in August in San Francisco. KEYNOTES Ducks, dolls, and divine robots: designing our futures with computing [46:26] Genevieve Bell, director of User…
The NEXT Service Design videos keep on coming, but very slowly. Here are another three: A Facebook for Things – Turning Physical Products into Digital Information Services Andy Hobsbawm, Evrythng There’s a revolution going on in the interaction between the physical and digital worlds. Innovations…