Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Many children want to read books on digital devices, while parents worry that technology will distract young bookworms, according to a survey by the publisher Scholastic. The New York Times reports: “Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun…
Dan Saffer of Kicker Studio has started a list of essays and articles that he feels are important touchstones and reference points for interaction designers. The list contains only publicly available articles. Any additions are more than welcome.
Below are the 2010 videos of the Human-Computer Interaction Seminar at Stanford University. Check also the full playlist. Redesigning the programming experience (May 28, 2010) Joel Brandt, a PhD candidate in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, discusses the roles that online resources play in creating…
Some UX developments at Telefónica, the Spanish telecommunications group. Telefónica introduces user experience lab Telefónica’s research and development unit has presented its user experience lab. Via the user experience lab, Telefónica R&D uses the technique of co-creation, involving users in the process of products /…
Every other month Mobile Monday Amsterdam organises a network event with visionary speakers and practical cases. The most recent one, on 6 September, was devoted to design and had a couple of top-level speakers. See the videos for yourselves. Matt Webb – Managing Director at…
In a three-part series Joshua-Michéle Ross explores on O’Reilly Radar a series of questions on the value and function of social media (a.k.a. social technologies). “I will not be arguing that social technologies are a bane or should be stopped. I don’t believe the former…
From farming to art, practices like sharing and bartering are being revived and updated for the Twitter age. The New York Times reports from Brooklyn. “Concepts like sharing and bartering — whether it’s fabric at Etsy Labs in Dumbo or powerboats at SailTime on the…
A couple of months ago former Nokia ethnographer Tricia Wang gave a talk at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, and she just posted the slideshow and the abstract on her blog. “My talk today is about how I came into my research…
New York Times cultural commentator Anand Giridharadas reflects on the fact that as the very idea of mass culture erodes, many people are synced with themselves but unsynced with those around them. “The digitizing, globalizing world is changing the working of culture. As some see…
The Intel announcements this week, particularly those by CTO Justin Rattner, are quite visionary. But also anthropologist Genevieve Bell’s approach is making waves in the community, such as this article by TechRadar.com. Before the Experience Lab, [Genevieve Bell] was working with the Digital Home team;…
Much coverage on the presentation by Justin Rattner (video), Intel’s CTO at the Intel Developer Forum, where he discussed a future with so-called context-aware computers and mobile devices. (Make sure to see the full video). PC Magazine Rattner describes the future of context-aware computing The…
The Internet may seem like a 21st-century nightmare version of the worst excesses of the marketplace, writes Melinda Blau in the Psychotherapy Networker. But it’s also creating new possibilities for connection and conversation. “Welcome to the Relationship Revolution—a radical shift in the way we view…
Ethan Zuckerman reports on yesterday’s Berkman Center lunch talk by Eric von Hippel, where he discussed what he called the “Household Sector†innovation. “Eric von Hippel, a long-time affiliate with the Berkman Center, leads off our 2010 season of lunch talks with a discussion of…
On his Gravity7 blog, Adrian Chan tries to convince startups and social application companies to embark on in-house social interaction design “The problem, as I see it, is that many small startups, and even some larger social media companies and efforts, lack user-centric and objective…
Kristina Krause has recently finished a master’s degree in social anthropology at the University of Kent, with a thesis titled: The impact of design ethnography and WordPress | Client – web designer relationships in the nonprofit sector. “The increasing rate of technological innovation and integration…
The Day Zero event of the Intel Developer Forum started off with a presentation by Intel Fellow (and anthropologist) Genevieve Bell who is now also the head of Intel’s Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) division, that is focused on defining new user experiences and new…
Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has published an extensive, three-part interview that Chad Sapieha conducted with Microsoft Principal Researcher (and fellow Canadian) Bill Buxton. “You’ve likely never heard of him, but he has almost certainly had an impact on your life. A principal researcher…
Not only are many unconcerned about strangers overhearing cellphone calls, we purposely broadcast our personal business on Facebook and Twitter. Sharon Jayson reports on the implications in USA Today. “A century ago, when the first home phones were “party lines” shared by neighbors, “worrying you…
Human-Computer Interaction for Development: The Past, Present, and Future Research article by Melissa R. Ho (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas N. Smyth (Georgia Institute of Technology), Matthew Kam( Carnegie Mellon University) and Andy Dearden (Shefaeld Hallam University) Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest…
I live in the future & here’s how it works Why your world, work, and brain are being creatively disrupted by Nick Bolton Crown Business, Sept. 2010 304 pages Amazon The New York Times has published an article that was adapted from the book I…
The Future Agenda, sponsored by Vodafone, is a not-for-profit, cross-discipline programme which aims “to unite the best minds from around the globe to address the greatest challenges of the next decade”. “In doing so, it will map out the major issues, identify and discuss potential…
Living with Complexity Norman, Donald A MIT Press, October 2010 280 pages Amazon If only today’s technology were simpler! It’s the universal lament, but it’s wrong. We don’t want simplicity. Simple tools are not up to the task. The world is complex; our tools need…
Experientia, the international experience design consultancy based in Turin, Italy, will be designing the new website of the training arm of the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation (ILO). The International Training Centre of the ILO is an advanced training institute located in Turin, that sits…
Four new articles in today’s edition of UXmatters: Juicy stories sell ideas By Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks Storytelling fits into the design process in many places. You probably know that collecting stories is key to user research and ensuring your UX designs tell a…
TAT, a Swedish software technology and mobile interface design company, recently ran a two-week open innovation experiment, during which they collaborate with the web community to sketch out an idea for two weeks and then build a video of the concept that gets most contribution…
The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life, writes Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd in the Technology Review. “Each time Facebook’s privacy settings change or a technology makes personal information available to new audiences, people scream foul.…
Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. The Economist reports in an article that quotes Danah Boyd and Ethan Zuckerman. “A generation of digital activists had hoped that the…
Adrian Chan of Gravity 7 and Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com and lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, together wrote an article on how best to respond to the world of social data, how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it…
Stowe Boyd went to BlogTalk in Galway, Ireland and came back inspired: sociality, he says, has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. “The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core.…
A few days ago sociologist Ms LucÃa Merino presented her PhD thesis entitled, Digital natives: a study of the technological socialisation of young people, at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). “Considering that young people nowadays are natives of the so-called digital culture, Ms…
Should we focus on changing the behaviour of people OR changing the behaviour of devices? That is the key question in article by Ajit Jaokar on his blog Open Gardens. “The many privacy related issues raised by the Web will be amplified in the world…
People pushing sustainability don’t tend to be the same types who love our digital-crazed iWorld. And that’s a problem because it means they don’t push one of the great advantages of dense, energy-efficient cities: urban life integrates far better with mobile devices than does its…
Libraries will have to build a new foundation if they are to recover from these economic hard times—a foundation of valuable services, of user experience, not just free content, writes Aaron Schmidt in Library Journal. “We need to stop focusing on giving away free content…
Researchers say that touch screens are the start of a trend to make computers more open to human gestures, argues the New York Times. “Device makers in a post-iPhone world are focused on fingertips, with touch at the core of the newest wave of computer…
The current issue of Interactions Magazine is generally on the nuances of what makes us human, writes co-editor-in-chief Jon Kolko, and more in particular “about authenticity, complexity, and design-and the political, social, and human qualities of our work”. Here are the articles that are currently…
The latest issue of the International Journal of Design, eer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, is devoted to the aesthetics of interaction design: This special issue attempts to provide an overview of current research in the Aesthetics of…
If a provocative new study is to be believed, the world lives in a situation where American undergraduates monopolize our knowledge of human nature, writes Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times. “In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences,…
Two new articles in UX Magazine: Don’t become a digital dinosaur by Samantha Starmer UX professionals can’t constrict a user’s experience to specified devices, touchpoints, or time periods. As devices integrate with each other and with the real world, we have to design for this…
Mostly the young are interested in letting others know their physical location. Others are reticent for safety reasons, or against providing too much information. The New York Times reports: “Internet companies have appropriated the real estate business’s mantra — it’s all about location, location, location.…
The New York Times reports on how online start-ups are allowing people to rent out their belongings locally, for a small fee. “The Roomba was mine for only 24 hours. I had rented it through a service called SnapGoods, which allows people to lend out…