Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Far from being a tool for oppression, as often portrayed in old science fiction, technology has become a means of liberation, argues the Financial Times. “Technology gets a bad rap in the old media. In books and films, it is often the machinery used by…
The New York Times discusses extensively the “Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship”, as propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His idea is deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy…
Last week I quoted from Robert Fabricant’s contribution to a Fast Company discussion roundtable on the impact of the mobile phone. Robert has meanwhile posted the full text of his response to the questions. Here another quote: “Density and connectivity are the keys drivers of…
Thomas Crampton, a former correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times, was asked to address an OECD gathering in Paris about his transition from journalism to digital strategy, focusing on his experiences within a traditional media company and the way it…
British Council press release: Breakthrough cities is a groundbreaking report on how cities can mobilise creativity and knowledge to tackle compelling social challenges. The report was commissioned by the British Council from the Young Foundation. Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater, established international experts in social…
MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media is hosting the annual meeting of Knight News Challenge winners at MIT, and Ethan Zuckerman is there. Aside from a Q&A session with Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen and sociologist/author Eric Klinenberg about the future of news, Zuckerman posts…
My quest of understanding the mainstreaming of hacker culture is now also endorsed by the BBC: “The maze of electronics on a typical circuit board can be difficult to decipher, but as hackers and tinkerers grow in number, an industry and web community have emerged…
The European Commission has announced plans for Europe to play a leading part in developing and managing interconnected networks formed from everyday objects with radio frequency identity (RFID) tags embedded in them – the so-called “internet of things”. The Commission has launched a 14-point action…
Jamais Cascio asks in a Fast Company article if the same technologies that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far more sinister. “In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing…
The UK Design Council just published — a little late — four short case studies based on the experience of Dott07, a year of community projects, events and exhibitions based in North East England and curated by John Thackara, that explored what life in a…
According to NewMediaAge, the UK Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the government body for business innovation in technology, and NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, will collaborate on digital user-centred test-bed projects, as part of the Digital Britain initiative, to develop and…
Clive Thompson explores the future of reading, and of books, in a digital world, and remains optimistic. “Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’t embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to…
A recent HarvardBusiness.org article about the use of anthropology and ethnography in global R&D strategies (blogged about here), has got Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase a bit worked up, as he thinks it “largely misses the point”. “For all the current buzz currently surrounding ethnographic…
In my ongoing exploration of the theme “we are all hackers now” (also the title of a talk I will give on 29 June in Brussels), I once again found quite a lot of recently published supporting material. We build the parts, you build the…
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a report that shows how Americans’ pursuit of health takes place within a widening network of both online and offline sources. Americans’ pursuit of health takes place within a widening network of both online and offline…
Emma Cook asks in The Times of London if our increasing desire to stay in the loop is distracting us from the people who should matter the most in our lives. “According to research carried out last year by Professor Nada Kakabadse at Northampton University,…
Interaction designers, business strategists and usability experts gathered last week in Malmö, Sweden for the third edition of the “From Business to Buttons” conference. Videos (alternate link) of the presentations are now online. A selection: The Zen of presentation design & delivery: Why it matters…
Nokia’s Ideas Project published two feature stories today: Digital We: A (Multiple) Identity Crisis We create new digital identities almost without limit – at the same time new technologies urge us to blur them. Is it a new digital arms race? “Intentionally or not, the…
Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful pilot program in India, a company executive said Monday. “Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful…
The increasing popularity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and their kin owes as much to sociology as technology. Steve Lohr reports in The New York Times. “The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather…
Stefana Broadbent, the acclaimed tech anthropologist, will be an invited speaker at the upcoming TEDGlobal conference (21-24 July, Oxford, UK). Stefana is currently a visiting research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, and was the head of the Customer Observatory at…
A US federal program providing subsidized phone service now offers cellphones, showing how much society values them, reports The New York Times. “The users are not the only ones receiving government assistance. Telecommunications industry analysts said the program, while in its infancy, could benefit mobile…
A somewhat controversial post by Helge Tennø, strategic director and digital planner at digital agency Screenplay in Oslo, Norway. “Products are just stuff, and represent nothing of value on their own. It is first when they are introduced to a situation (or context) of importance…
Somehow I missed out on this 24 May New York Times article about South Korea being the test case for the mobile future, thanks to its high-speed wireless networks and top technology companies. “It has been a while since the mobile phone became more than…
Bill Thompson, back from the Venice Biennale, reflects on digital art and its relationship with technology. “While there was a lot of interesting art, I saw little that attempted to explore our use of or reliance on technology itself, and the only two pieces I…
When Fast Company asked some people in the industry what mobile phones will look like 10 years from now, the first couple of answers seem to reinforce my gut feeling that the difference between main mobile devices and mobile accessories will evaporate entirely. But Robert…
The latest issue of Ambidextrous, Stanford University’s journal of design, has just been published. The issue is entirely online. Two of my favourite articles: Mind the gap: ethnographers navigate the space between users and designers (pages 40-42) An interview of Michael Barry and Griff Coleman,…
Web 2.0 solutions offer people in rural areas a platform for networking and knowledge exchange. This brochure, published by GTZ, provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the…
With faith that smart ideas will prevail, Nokia urges workers to say what’s on their minds—and pours money into their concepts. Business Week reports: “Nokia set up an intranet soapbox last spring known as Blog-Hub, opening it to employee bloggers around the world. Posting under…
Navi Radjou argues on the HarvardBusiness.org Voices blog that R&D in emerging markets needs fewer engineers and more anthropologists. “To effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer base in emerging markets, I believe multi-national companies [MNCs] must adopt a…
The Future Tense programme on Australia’s ABC Radio features bottom-up, user-generated innovation in Africa: “In this program we’ll highlight several interesting initiatives, one in Africa and one in the South Asia region, initiatives which have had success largely because of their responsiveness to people needs.…
The Mobile Difference, a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life project covers at length the current social implications of mobile internet access in the United States: “Some 39% of Americans have positive and improving attitudes about their mobile communication devices, which in…
Fabio Sergio, a design and user experience strategist, creative director at frog design, and former associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, was one of the speakers at the Frontiers of Interaction conference that took place on Tuesday in Rome, Italy. “Given the themes of…
Barclays 360 magazine, a quarterly thought leadership magazine for senior management within the Barclays Group, is devoted to simplicity in product and service design. Here are the feature articles (of which the last one, which is excellently written and directly dealing with the current state…
Last night the School of Visual Arts in New York hosted a series of lectures on service design. “While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we’ve entered a service economy. It’s not…
The people of Microfinance Podcast have just posted a short video interview with Nick Hughes, Head of International Mobile Payment Solutions at the Vodafone Group, who has been instrumental in getting M-PESA up and running. Watch video (via CGAP)
This week the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion hosted a conference about the “Bottom of the Pyramid” and Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik and writing director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, has an excellent and long summary…
Matt Jones, founder and former lead designer at Dopplr and also former director of UX design at Nokia, is now a principal designer at Schulze & Webb in London. He was also one of the speakers at the Frontiers of Interaction conference that took place…
The latest issue of Vodafone’s Receiver Magazine is all about a new era of human interaction that is marked by perpetual conversations and perpetual info drip-feed, as enabled by the umbilical of the mobile. Two new contributions explore the time paradox created by this constant…