Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Smashing Magazine author Dan Redding interviewed Marcin Wichary, Senior User Experience Designer at Google. “Marcin Wichary’s fascination with the relationship between humans and machines began at an early age. As a boy in Poland, he was mesmerized by the interaction between arcade patrons and the…
Usability consultant Frank Spillers writes that he the recent release of Google’s social circles (part of the new ‘Google +’ social network) constitutes a social interface that accounts for real-world considerations. “Social circles are an approach to privacy user experience that takes us a step…
Smart Design’s think tank presents an ongoing discussion of how gender should be included in good design – all published in a new series on Fast Company. The Femme Den started thinking about gender and design five years ago as an expansion of Smart Design’s…
Jane Wakefield, BBC technology reporter, explores how the social experience of real shopping can help improve web retail, and how the online social shopping experience could become yet another threat to the high street. “Offline retailers have long held that online shopping will never replace…
The Behavioural Insight Team of David Cameron’s Cabinet Office – widely known as the ‘nudge unit‘, has published the report, Behaviour Change and Energy Use, setting out how we can use behavioural insights to help people save energy and money. The report launches a series…
Forget Web 2.0. During a panel on social media at the recent Wharton Global Alumni Forum, industry experts argued that we are now in a “third wave” of disruption in the tech sector. While the post-bubble era was about user-generated content, they say the future…
Peter Lunenfeld (wikipedia), professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, argues in a New Scientist op-ed piece for the importance of what he calls “meaningful uploading”, which is still difficult for most people since “for the past half-century, much of the world’s…
MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle presents – during a June 1 talk at the RSA in London – the results of a fifteen year exploration of the colossal impact technology has had on our lives and communities. Thirty years ago we asked…
The Apple tablet is helping people with disabilities by reading e-mails, voicing directions, and zooming in on text. “Apple has added features that make the iPhone and iPad easily accessible, not only to visually impaired people but also to those with hearing loss and other…
Matt Frassica asks — in The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal (republished in USA Today) — what the increasing popularity of e-reader devices means for the experience of reading. Do we read differently when we can get (almost) any book ever published, whenever we want? Read article
AGCOM, Italy’s independent and autonomous Communications Authority is about to decide (on July 6) to controversially appoint itself – without any further Parliament approval needed – to take on the powers to order the removal of any online content in case of presumed copyright violation.…
Donald Norman alerts us – with strong recommendation – to check out the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction now being assembled by Mads Soegaard and the team at Interaction-Design.org. A Seven chapters – Action Research, Bifocal Display, Data Visualization for Human Perception, Human Computer Interaction (HCI),…
Mike Kruzeniski is Creative Director at Microsoft, in the Windows Phone design studio, currently leading the Windows Phone Apps Design team. Kruzeniski gave a talk at SXSW Interactive, entitled “How Print Design is the Future of Interaction,” about how the history of print design is…
Innovhub, the innovation agency of the Milan Chamber of Commerce, has selected the international user experience design consultancy Experientia to help Milan-based SMEs to innovate, using the most advanced processes in web and industrial design. The goal of Innovhub is to promote innovation and competitiveness…
The Guardian reports on a study by an “exasperated academic” (Philip Ely, head of the business and community school at the University for the Creative Arts, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Surrey‘s Digital World Research Centre) on the faults in home entertainment…
In one of the biggest surveys of happiness carried out in the aftermath of the economic crisis, the vast majority of people in Britain, France and Italy have little faith in their governments and think the free market economy is a flawed system. In contrast,…
One of the people presenting at the DPPI conference in Milan last week was Aviaja Borup Lynggaard, an industrial Ph.D. scholar at Bang & Olufsen (B&O), attached to the Aarhus School of Architecture and Aarhus University. Her very interesting Ph.D. project – which aims to…
Imagine when a journey from A to B is no longer routine, as your car in the near-future encourages a sense of play, exploration and learning. This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design…
A new master in interaction design will start in September in Switzerland — with some teaching support from Experientia — and a few places are still available. The MAS in Interaction design at the University of the Applied Sciences and the Arts of Southern Switzerland…
Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis by Helen Thornham, City University London, UK Ethnographies of the Videogame Ashgate, July 2011, 218 pages [Amazon UK link] Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new…
Imagine a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are. This number would help determine whether you receive a job, a hotel-room upgrade or free samples at the supermarket. If your influence score is low, you don’t get the…
David Rose (LinkedIn), CEO of Vitality (where he works on healthy behavior change) and lecturer at MIT Media Lab (and former CEO of Ambient Devices), gave a talk recently at TEDxBerkeley on how magic anticipates ubiquitous computing. “Magic, or enchantment, is the right metaphor for…
Consumers have a growing appetite for health and wellness gadgets and this represents a burgeoning market opportunity for device manufacturers that has barely been tapped, according to a study from IBM. “There’s a huge group of mobile users that you may be overlooking as you…
Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, reports on how Activate 2011, the one-day conference in London on technology and development, made clear it’s not just about technology, but who uses it and how. “As the day drew to a close, I was left with…
A road(map) to sustainability: How an Expo centre can become low-impact The Event project, funded by Flanders In Shape, a Flemish design promotion agency, created a framework for the Kortrijk Xpo centre to become the most environmentally sustainable trade fair and congress complex in Belgium…
Danah Boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, posted the crib of her recent Personal Democracy Forum talk on networked privacy. “Our contemporary ideas about privacy are often shaped by legal discourse that emphasizes…
Ethnography and The Corporate Encounter Reflections on Research in and of Corporations Edited by Melissa Cefkin Berghahn Books 2010, 262 pages Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as…
On 29 March, Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken chaired the European SEE Conference on integrating design into regional and national policies. The high-level conference, which also featured Peter Dröll, the European Commission’s Head of Innovation Policy, was organised by the SEE project, a network of eleven…
What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers Collins, 2011 304 pages In the 20th century humanity consumed products faster than ever, but this way of living is no longer sustainable. This new and…
Share or Die is the first collection of writing from Generation Y about post-college work and life in the 21st Century. “It contains nearly 30 essays, cartoons, instructional how-to’s, and guides from Shareable contributors. In its pages, young people tell the story of a new…
Domus Magazine has published an op-ed advocating a different approach to designing space – to succeed the single-author model – that includes tools from disparate sources to create new paradigms for thinking and building The contributors included Paola Antonelli (MoMA), Adam Bly (Seed Media Group),…
UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, 15 interviewees respond to the question: In the fight for better experiences, are you winning or losing? Watch video
Your Better Life Index is an interactive tool that allows you to see how countries perform according to the importance you give to each of 11 topics – housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance – that contribute…
Experientia wins Italian National Prize for Innovation in Services, sponsored by the Italian government and Confcommercio. The President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, awards the prize. Rome, Tuesday 14 June 2011 Today, the president of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, awarded Experientia srl with the…
Experientia vince la terza edizione del Premio Nazionale per l’Innovazione nei Servizi, istituito dal Governo Italiano e Confcommercio-Imprese per l’Italia. Il Presidente della Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano consegna il premio. Roma, martedì 14 giugno 2011 Oggi il Presidente della Repubblica Italiana Giorgio Napolitano ha insignito Experientia…
We are increasingly suffering from consumption fatigue, but brands and designers have yet to acknowledge the fact, reckons David Carlson in Closed Wallets, Closed Minds, the latest issue of the David Report. Brands must either get used to the idea of a world in which…
The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg Paperback, 67 pages The Architectural League of New York In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 8, Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of…
The World Health Organisation has just issued a major (free) report on mHealth, entitled “mHealth: New horizons for health through mobile technologies“. Abstract Only five years ago who would have imagined that today a woman in sub-Saharan Africa could use a mobile phone to access…
Digital cash and online markets have the potential to loosen governments’ grip on the currency that makes the economy go round. In this special report the New Scientist examines how this could change money forever. Editorial – Back to a networked world The internet is…
Experiments suggest that wisdom of the crowd can be countered by too much communication within that crowd. “The wisdom of crowds turns out to be an incredibly fragile phenomenon. It doesn’t take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd. Worse, a new…