Recently the psychologist Ralph Hertwig and legal scholar Christoph Engel have published an extensive taxonomy of motives for deliberate ignorance. They identified two sets of motives, in particular, that have a particular relevance to the need for ignorance in the face of AI. The first…
Jim Balsillie, former chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion, doesn’t mince his words in discussing the new Google-affiliated waterfront development Sidewalk Toronto: What happens with Toronto’s waterfront infrastructure will have profound and permanent impacts on the digital rights and prosperity of all Canadians because…
As part of a new approach to user interfaces, Amy Wilson, Head of Product at SAP SuccessFactors, pulled designers together with behavioral scientists with backgrounds in cultural anthropology. The goal was to help the designers better understand the way most individuals intuitively work. This way,…
A few days ago Experientia attended the Service Design Days in Barcelona. One of the surprise presentations was by Anna Pohlmeyer, who co-directs the Delft Institute for Positive Design. Although the title seemed a bit airy and ephemeral, the talk was anything but. Anna’s approach…
Last week IKEA launched its fifth Life at Home global research report. Every year, the company sets out to understand more about what makes a better life at home by connecting with thousands of people where they live. Ever since the 2016 report, IKEA has…
Experientia is proud to have been a key participant at the Roche Innovation Summit, held at Roche headquarters in Basel Switzerland on 19 June 2018. Themed “Transforming the Healthcare Experience Together”, the summit aimed to galvanize the Roche community around the future transformation of healthcare…
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus By Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, November 2018, 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through conflict with smart lights to…
Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino Apress, 2018, 168 pages Examine the history of smart homes, how technology shapes our lives, and ways you can think about the home when developing new products. This book presents the opportunities in…
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard MIT Press, 248 pages April 17, 2018 A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith…
The MyData 2018 conference took place in Helsinki on August 29-31. The core idea behind the MyData movement is that we, you and I, should have an easy way to see where data about us goes, specify who can use it, and alter these decisions…
Leslie K. John, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, is specialized in the psychology of privacy decisions. In this excellent cover story for the Harvard Business Review, she analyzes why people are so bad at making decisions about their private data (“They misunderstand both…
Moments when the experience of a blistering day turns public attention to the expertise of climate scientists brings Hannah Knox, associate professor of anthropology at University College London, to explore some of the thorniest of questions we face in the global, modelled, connected world in…
Made by Humans – The AI Condition by Ellen Broad Melbourne University Publishing July 2018, 277 pages [eBook link] An Australian data expert challenges the idea of AI being better than humans Who is designing AI? A select, narrow group. How is their world view…
Behind the screens of the games we play and digital communities we interact with are psychologists and other behavioral science experts, who are hired to create products that we want to use more and more. Big tech now employs mental health experts to use persuasive…
Reclaiming the Smart City: Personal Data, Trust and the New Commons Why and how city governments are taking a more responsible approach to the collection and use of personal data By Theo Bass, Emma Sutherland, and Tom Symons Monday, 23 July 2018 Nesta UK [pdf…
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data Paul Dourish, Edgar Gómez Cruz Big Data & Society Journal Sage Publications, July 4, 2018 Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial 4.0 License Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work…
We are witnessing the emergence of a new phenomenon in health care: self-organizing, online communities of patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, academics, and industry, all focused on a particular disease. Patient-led sites that offer support and information are the most well-known. They typically offer a moderated…
We have unwittingly accepted the paradigm that technology comes first, with people relegated to doing the actions that the machines cannot do, writes Don Norman. This requires people to act like machines, ever ready to take over when things go wrong. As a result, we…
In an ideal world, when we are faced with a new health problem, a clinician is available to sit down and address all our questions and anxieties about the condition and its treatment. This ideal is rarely met in the United States health system. More…
“If we want to overcome the systemic issues behind today’s problems, then we need to change the thinking that led to them to begin with, writes Dr. Leyla Acaroglu, award winning designer, UNEP Champion of the Earth, social scientist and entrepreneur. The status quo of…
New York based writer Carrie Neill interviews tech ethnographer Tricia Wang on why the digital age means everyone (even non-researchers) should understand ”thick data”. Any modern person who calls themselves an ethnographer or a qualitative researcher needs to be both a people nerd and a…
Lou Downe, Director of Design and Service Standards for the UK Government based at GDS, is concerned that we don’t have discernible professional standards for service design. Instead of talking “about what we’re trying to achieve when we design a service, we’ve defined *how* to…
The UK Government’s Data Ethics Framework guides the design of appropriate data use in government and the wider public sector. This guidance is aimed at anyone working directly or indirectly with data in the public sector, including data practitioners (statisticians, analysts and data scientists), policymakers,…
UX and Service Design for Connected Products by Claire Rowland Digital Catapult, 2018, 36 pages (via IoT.uk) There are a huge variety of applications in IoT spanning connected products and hardware enabled services. Consumer products such as home lighting and heating controllers are growing in…
Hai una startup? Hai mai pensato ai benefici che potrebbe trarre dal Design Thinking? Questa è l’opportunità per scoprirlo! DesAlps Workshop #2: Il Design Thinking per la tua startup! Giovedì 28 giugno 2018 – dalle 9:30 alle 17:00 @ I3P | Corso Castelfidardo 30/a, Torino…
Radical Help – How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state By Hilary Cottam Virago Publishing June 2018, 320 pages > Book talk at the RSA How should we live: how should we care for one another; grow our capabilities…
Massive Codesign. A Proposal for a Collaborative Design Framework By Anna Meroni, Daniela Selloni and Martina Rossi Released with the Creative Commons License Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 Italia (CC BY-ND 3.0 IT) in the peer reviewed Design International series by Franco Agneli Editori March 2018, 182 pages…
At the Ritual Design Lab in Silicon Valley, a small team of “interaction designers” is working to generate new rituals for modern life, with an eye to user experience. Created by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, the lab crafts rituals for both individuals and organizations,…
Putting people at the centre when designing and delivering buildings of the future is crucial to unlocking the potential of new technologies, according to the third installment of Buildings of the Future paper (pdf) released by Aurecon, an Australasian engineering and infrastructure advisory company. Aurecon…
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor By Virginia Eubanks St. Martin’s Press, January 2018 272 pages The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake…
Experientia è lieta di invitare le piccole e medie imprese del territorio piemontese al: DesAlps Workshop #1: Il Design Thinking per le PMI Venerdì 18 maggio 2018 – dalle 9.00 alle 17.30 @ Rinascimenti Sociali | via Maria Vittoria 38, Torino Scopri i vantaggi che…
Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset by Jay Hasbrouck Routledge Press, December 2017 140 pages This book argues that ‘ethnographic thinking’―the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their practice―offers companies and organizations the cultural insights they need to develop fully-informed strategies. Using real world…
I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy By Cris Beam Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2018 272 pages Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as…
On Weaponised Design is an excellent, very well-informed essay by Cade, published in February 2018 on the Our Data Our Selves site of the Tactical Technology Collective, a Berlin-based non profit dedicated to privacy, digital security and info-activism. The lived experiences of digital platform users…
(Scroll down for English) Come può il design generare impatto? In continuità con il summit International Days of Deans and Experts: Impact Through Design (Barcellona, aprile 2018) Torino ospita il primo evento dedicato alla prospettiva italiana sull’impatto generato attraverso il design in riferimento ai Sustainable…
James Ingram, chief executive officer of visual content creation company Splashlight, explains why we need digital anthropologists to handle handle, interpret and apply cultural analysis to data and arrive at consumer insight. Making sense of copious amounts of data in a way that will benefit…
Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave Systems, predicts in TechCrunch that the next big game-changer in technology interface is ambient contextuality. “Ambient contextuality hinges on the idea that there is information hidden all around us that helps clarify our intent in any…
Doteveryone, a UK think tank that champions responsible technology for the good of everyone in society [similar to Milan’s newly founded Digital Culture Center], published two reports this year: the first one, The Digital Attitudes Report, explores how the British public thinks and feels about…
An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible By Lara Penin Bloomsbury Visual Arts, May 2018 344 pages A comprehensive introduction to designing services according to the needs of the customer or participants, this book addresses a new and emerging field of design and the…
The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys MIT Press May 2018, 179 pages How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books.…
