Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Last week, the IASDR 2009 conference (International Association of Societies of Design Research) took place in Seoul, South Korea, and all videos of the keynote speeches are already available. Donald A. Norman: Science and Design I start with three contradictory views: First, that a science…
In winter 2006, under the aegis of philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, a collective of students from theIUAV University in Venice (including Experientia collaborator Miguel Cabanzo) fanned out to subject the city of Venice, Italy to a process of forensic structural mapping. Out of this field work,…
Computerworld New Zealand introduces user-centred web design. Introducing user-centred web design The first article in this series introduces the idea of User-Centred Design (UCD) — a design process that concentrates on designing websites for the people who will use them; rather than to embody the…
Irene Cassarino, an Experientia collaborator, reports on the First European Conference on Energy Efficiency and Behaviour, which took place in Maastricht last week: What role do objects play in our life and culture? It depends on their embedded scripts. Like actors on-stage, they tell us…
And still two more video rushes on the site of Digital Revolution. Arianna Huffington interview – USA Arianna Huffington is the co-founder of the influential news blog The Huffington Post. Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution programme one team met with Arianna to discuss the…
More video rushes on the site of Digital Revolution (working title), an open source documentary, due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010, that will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee interview – Ghana Tim…
A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova Available as a print-on-demand book from lulu.com. Click here to order. Available as a free download here. The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of…
The boys at design consultancy BERG are prolific this week: Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like by Tom Armitage “There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it’s about what material explorations look like when performed with data. Partly, it’s about the…
Peggy Orenstein forced herself offline, and reflects in the New York Times Magazine whether this is the path to true knowledge: “Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses…
Yadin Dudai writes in the New Scientist on two books on memory and forgetting in the digital age — Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, and Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age by…
True innovators need to know as much about when, why, and how not to use trendy technology as when to use it, says Microsoft Research principal scientist Bill Buxton. “Rather than marveling at what someone else is delivering today, and then trying to copy it,…
As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. CNN reports. “Microsoft and many other companies realize…
Three articles in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM are quite relevant for the readers of this blog: Usable security: how to get it Why does your computer bother you so much about security, but still isn’t secure? It’s because users don’t have…
The people behind Digital Revolution (working title), an open source documentary, due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010, that will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web, have posted some more rushes online: Clay Shirky interview –…
Denise Deveau, technology writer at The Globe and Mail speaks with Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s identity guru, about what it will take for consumers and businesses to feel secure sharing information online. How much do you trust your digital life? Has the fear of identity theft…
Damian Kernahan (featured earlier) just published his second article in Fast Thinking, an Australian innovation quarterly — this time on user-centred design. “Web designers have had a focus on user-centred design and have used it successfully as a discipline for many years and any Google…
Author, speaker and technologist Juliette Powell sees the true significance of social media technology in the new kinds of collaborations we are able to forge that offer the potential to create a new kind of future. In a video on Nokia’s IdeasProject, Powell discusses her…
Mobile phones have been a boon to developing countries and to social development. Access to mobiles may indeed allow for better medical information, change the way farmers grow and sell crops, expand the way families interact, influence the way governments treat their citizens, and improve…
MG Siegler writes on ReadWriteWeb about the fact that desktop touch screens don’t really work well for humans, and introduces a brilliant concept video “for something called 10/GUI.” “It brings up some key issues surrounding the future of touch input from both a hardware and…
What’s the difference between personalization and customization? Are consumers really in control? Do brands (and designers) want them to be? Nick de la Mare of Creativity considers curation and the myth and reality of control. “A few weeks ago I heard myself say, “we want…
Philips Design and ABN AMRO’s Dialogues Incubator cooperate to create the ‘Rationalizer’ concept, an emotion sensing system targeted at serious home investors who trade online. It acts as an ’emotion mirror’ in which the intensity of the user’s feelings is reflected. Research shows that home…
Yesterday TalkTalk, the UK broadband division of Carphone Warehouse, launched the Digital Anthropology Report – a comprehensive insight into how British people use the internet. “We spoke to over 2,000 people around the country and looked at their attitudes to technology, how they use the…
More details are emerging about Project Canvas, the ambitious joint venture by the BBC, ITV, Five and BT to bring internet video services such as the iPlayer from the bedroom PC to the living-room TV set, reports Tim Bradshaw on FT.com’s techblog. “An interview in…
Both the Wall Street Journal and Techcrunch devote extensive space today to our ever evolving online communication patterns. The Wall Street Journal looks at how a shift towards a new generation of services like Twitter and Facebook “promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in…
Dan Hill (ARUP) wrote a long review of the ‘Toward the Sentient City’ exhibition curated by Mark Shepard and organised by the Architectural League of New York. “This show does nothing less than delineate a possible future trajectory for architecture, in which it remains relevant…
Dan Lockton of Brunel University (UK), who runs a blog called Design with Intent, which focuses on strategic design that’s intended to influence or result in certain user behaviour, has posted some very worthwhile student project examples: Some interesting projects (Part 1) Some projects address…
Most talk about Google Wave is focussed on technology, not people. Tom Simonite attempts to change the discourse with his article in The New Scientist. “The cultural norms that will shape Wave’s future are yet to be established. But informed crystal-ball gazing is possible, based…
Damian Kernahan of Proto Partners asks in Fast Thinking, an Australian innovation quarterly, why service organisations don’t deliver their customers a great experience, when all it takes is a little planning and design. “In this article we will look at trying to understand why we…
Here are the five stories that appeared in the special “Digital Cities” feature of Wired UK’s November issue. Words on the street by Adam Greenfield Ubiquitous, networked information will reshape our cities. ‘Sense-able’ urban design by Carlo Ratti Digital elements blanket our environment: transforming our…
User experience researcher Sasha Lubomirsky talks about his work at YouTube: “If you think about watching a video online, it may seem pretty easy. A player, a play/pause button and some content. Done. But what about if the video is being played on a mobile…
Martijn de Waal was at the Picnic 2009 conference in Amsterdam, where he attended the session entitled “The City as an Interaction Platform”: Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social…
San Francisco-based user experience consultancy Montparnas started a three-part series on the relationship between product development and user experience design. “Product development and user experience design are two fields that should, but rarely, collaborate effectively to design and define products that consumers will find delightful…
Digital Revolution (working title) is an open source documentary, due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010, that will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web. The BBC intends to tell the story of the web in four…
Microsoft is exploring the concept of multi-touch mice, a new research paper reveals. The paper is being presented today as part of the User Interface Software and Technology conference, and identifies five different prototypes, each based on different sensor technologies. The devices also rely on…
Kevin Anderson reports in The Guardian on how a new generation of monitors can generate data about your energy use and help you cut your costs and carbon. “These energy monitors not only show you real-time information about your energy consumption, many of them also…
Eric Wilmot writes on Greener Design on how to design for a post-consumption society. And an excellent article it is. “The current interpretation of human-centered has expanded to indulge human desires at the expense of other equally critical considerations. This is a dangerous interpretation that…
When companies develop innovative products that don’t obviously fit within established categories, managers need to help people understand what they are. However what category you place something in has a huge influence on how you view its basic properties. Mary Tripsas reports in the New…
Donald Norman recently gave a keynote address at the “21st Century Transmedia Innovation Symposium” in Seoul, Korea. “Normal dictionaries do not have the word ‘transmedia,’” he says, “but Wikipedia does. That definition introduced me to many other words that neither I nor my dictionaries had…
As part of his Design for Interaction MSc. at the TU Delft, David Güiza Caicedo worked on developing a tool to measure emotional reactions towards “services”: from which an early concept has recently spun-off into a more developed tool to aid in the assessment of…
The second issue of Touchpoint, the sdn’s Service Design Journal, is out. Entitled “Health and Service Design”, this brand-new issue features articles of Service Design and/or healthcare experts such as Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter (NHS), Lavrans Løvlie (liveIwork), Ben Reason (live|work), Mark…