Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
AIGA has uploaded the videos of the 2010 Gain conference. Erica Eden, senior industrial designer at Smart Design, and co-founder at Femme Den, was one of the speakers with her talk “Designing (for) Women: Bridging the Gap Between Assumptions and Realities“. Femme Den, said the…
How has the most revolutionary innovation of our time – the internet – transformed our world? What does it mean for the modern family? How has it changed our concepts of privacy? Of celebrity? Of love, sex and hate? These are some of the questions…
A survey of developed and developing countries suggests citizens’ sense of wellbeing does not rise with increasing wealth. “Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation’s wealth and the wellbeing…
Most Americans don’t want to be tracked on the Internet and are unwilling to trade their privacy for web ads that are tailored to their interests. So suggest the results of a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of Internet users conducted over the weekend. The results are…
Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, Scotland, wonders whether devices like iPhones and Blackberries are actually becoming extensions of our thinking selves. “The fact that there is a stable biological core that…
As part of a new CNN series on internet and the end of privacy, John D. Sutter reflects on the world of public living — where most everything about a person’s habits, location and preferences is just a few clicks away. “As people share more…
Michelle Thorne, international project manager at Creative Commons, spoke at TEDxKreuzberg on Designing for Collaborative Consumption. She posted her slides and speaking notes online. Important characteristics of Collaborative Consumption: Critical Mass Firstly, you need enough goods or services on offer to make the platform attractive…
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases by Jakob Schneider and Marc Stickdorn Book Industry Services (BIS) 16 Dec 2010 Hardcover, 376 pages Publisher’s page – Book blog – Amazon page This is Service Design Thinking introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing…
Experientia, the international user experience design consultancy, has signed a five-year research and education collaboration agreement with the Design and Human Engineering School (DHE) of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) – Korea’s new top university – in a quest to change…
Sarah Drummond, one half of Scotland based dynamic duo Snook, presents a case study about the implications and challenges of using Service Design for Social Innovation in the community of Wyndford, UK. Watch video (via InfoDesign)
In Mobile Message, a new series of blog posts for Nat Geo News Watch starting today, innovator, anthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Ken Banks shares exciting stories about how mobile phones are being used throughout the world to improve, enrich, and empower billions of…
David Bevans of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers interviewed Mike Kuniavsky, writer, designer, researcher and entrepreneur and co-founder of both ThingM, an electronic hardware design, development and manufacturing company, and Adaptive Path, and author of “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (previously featured on Putting People…
The UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph profiles Cordell Ratzlaff, director of user-centred design at Cisco Systems, and former head of Apple’s Human Interface Group. “Like a lot of prominent technology companies, Cisco has recognised that its products aren’t as intuitive to use as they could…
In a long blog post, digital product designer Daniel McKenzie makes a case for emotional and human empathy. “The ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and accurately intuit their experience is one of the most overlooked skills, not only in the area of…
Automation World reports at length on how human-centered design techniques are gaining attention in the world of industrial controls and automation, as more users struggle with complex user interfaces. “Many of today’s industrial products, with their ever-growing feature sets, have become too complex and difficult…
To mark the 25th edition of “The World in”, The Economist’s annual collection of predictions for the year ahead, the newspaper asked some people to peer 25 years ahead. Economy: Jim O’Neill Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management Food: Jamie Oliver Chef, restaurateur and campaigner…
Two new articles in UX Magazine: Crafting the UX of REI’s retail experience by Samantha Starmer Video interview (with text transcript) on the strategy, techniques and thinking behind translating REI‘s warm, hand-crafted in-store experiences into the digital space. Customer Experience Nirvana: How UX and marketing…
The Megacities on the Move report says authorities must start planning their transport infrastructure now for a future when two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. The Forum for the Future report devotes a lot of attention to new types of user-centred…
In the field of exhibition design, the quality of User Experience makes the difference between success and failure. When designing exhibits for museums or science centers, exhibition designers consider interaction, experience, interface and, critically, environment. Cheryl Downes McCoy of Cooper considers how we construct the…
Today, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) announced the launch of the IxDA Interaction Awards, a first-of-its-kind awards program dedicated to celebrating global excellence in the discipline of Interaction Design. The inaugural Interaction Awards will recognize and promote 10 outstanding works completed in the last two…
I just finished reading Living with Complexity by Donald A. Norman (previously announced here) and consider an important contribution to our field, and this for three precise reasons. First, Norman has a huge reputation, also outside of our professional UX sphere. His books are often…
Designing Media, the new book by Bill Moggridge, director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and founder of IDEO, is now available in hard copy, as a DVD and as a downloadable pdf. Abstract Mainstream media, often known simply as MSM, have not yet disappeared…
Norden, the Nordic Innovation Center, has published the results of a research project between Denmark, Norway and Iceland, that explored the increasingly strong connection between ICT and user-driven innovation in those countries, and how this approach could be transferred from the IT sector to traditional…
Digital marketing expert Dhiren Shingadia interviewed ethnographer and technology researcher Tricia Wang to learn how ethnography can provide new insights for companies seeking to understand communities. “My primary output is analysis of how new technology users are living at the intersection of macro processes. Examples…
Sebastian Greger, social interaction designer, internet sociologist and post-graduate student at the Media Lab of the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki, has published his Master’s research that aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of…
The Korean partner newspaper of the International Herald Tribune today published an interview with Hwang Sung-gul, the creative designer of mobile devices at Motorola Korea, about the thinking and work that goes into designing a mobile phone. Gul, whom I had the great pleasure of…
Organizations designing for marginalized populations have many design approaches to inform their efforts to enact lasting change. Some are adapted from first-world commercial processes, and others were actively developed in the field by teams directly involved in empowering communities lacking access to many modern…
A couple of weeks ago the Design Center Busan (in Busan, South Korea) organised its first International Design Congress. The speakers featured not only the writer of this post (Mark Vanderbeeken – as reported here), but also the highly esteemed Professor Tamio Fukuda, of the…
The autumn issue of Koreana, the quarterly devoted to Korean art and culture, contains a special feature on Korea’s smartphone era. The articles come in a range of other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. Mobile phones in Korea: between…
Digital U (Youtube) is the the first television/web series to examine how the internet and social media is changing the world around us. Digital U is an eight-part series that looks at transparency, crowdsourcing, privacy and security – with powerful examples that demonstrate how the…
Allison Arieff writes in the New York Times Opinionator blog extensively on how citizens harness technology to offer up solutions to problems in their communities. “What if there were a way to transform complaints into something positive and productive? What if we reframed the exchange…
The amount of data that can now be collected about how drivers use their cars is unprecedented, reports the BBC, and the impact of so much information is potentially huge. The article highlights the innovative role of Fiat, which has been compiling data from the…
Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of Apple’s iPhone debut in Korea. Prolonged regulatory bickering had been long delayed its release, coming more than a year after its release in the U.S. and other countries. But late as it was, the iPhone’s impact was bigger than…
Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken recently became one of Canvas8′s newest Thought Leaders, lending his insights and knowledge to the site’s growing archives of articles and interviews on cultural global trends. Canvas8 draws on the knowledge of recognised industry thought leaders to offer expert insight into…
Governments around the world must continue to embrace social media and other new technologies because besides empowering citizens new technologies bring in a “myriad of benefits” for the public sector as well, argues Kelly Dempski of Accenture Technology Labs on eGov Monitor. For the government,…
Over the past decade, Living Labs have become an established part of local and regional innovation systems, using a variety of methods and tools, and focusing on a wide array of domains and themes. However, the experimental, learning-by-doing set up of Living Labs within various…
Marek Pawlowski, the founder of MEX, explores in UX Magazine several future trends he expects to be of significance for UX practitioners as the balance of user expectations tilts ever further towards mobile scenarios. Read article
David Wigder, Vice President of Business Development at RecycleBank, explores on Marketing Green the rise of the peer-to-peer green economy, and in particular the three emerging peer-to-peer models that can facilitate greener transactions: “Online models challenge the notion of permanent ownership, and with it the…
Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson, is a big advocate of using science fiction narratives as a jumping off point for a discussion between management and engineering about the future of Intel’s business, reports BoingBoing today (see also video). Intel Germany’s Morrow Project (“Uber Morgen“)…
Experientia president Michele Visciola was invited to send a video message to the World Usability Day 2010 event in Tokyo, Japan. Michele, who is also European Regional Coordinator for the Usability Professional’s Association, spoke on the event’s theme of communication, and the relationship between communication…