Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Nokia’s Ideas Project published a feature story on why technology may be making money superfluous. “We’re entering a time in which products are expected to give themselves over as platforms for innovation and reinvention. Even money, something we tend to think of as absolute, seems…
Changing behaviour will be as vital as new technologies in tackling climate change. So where is the funding for linguists, anthropologists and sociologists? Tariq Tahir reports in The Guardian. “Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional carers, tackle extreme weather events…
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven Princeton University Press Hardcover, May 2009 Abstract About forty percent of the world’s people live on incomes of two dollars a day or…
Experientia is proud to announce the official launch of Humin, a programme developed for Flemish SMEs and startâ€ups that creates competitive advantage through people-centred innovation. In May-June last year Experientia (in collaboration with Richard Eisermann of Prospect and Tjeu Arits of Arits Consulting) worked intensively…
The Futures of Learning blog, which is associated with a MacArthur Foundation project, just announced a new blog series that reports on the literature review conducted as part of the project, Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age. Funded by…
The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a study of more than 1000 workers which shows that the mobile phone does not make people any more rushed or pressured for time. An analysis of more than 20,000 calls and texts logged by participants confirms the…
Our friends at Adaptive Path have posted some information on a design and research project that aimed to understand how mobile technology can work more effectively in emerging markets. The company went to rural India to investigate the impact of mobile technology and developed concepts…
The blog series on New Media Practices in International Contexts, which I announced in January, is now complete. It covers the unique characteristics of digital media user behaviours in very different socio-cultural contexts of China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan and Ghana, with a particular…
Watch this excellent 1 hour documentary film about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. “In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s FA Trophy Semi-Final match against…
Further on my earlier theme of “we are all hackers now“, here is a long feature on user-generated devices by Fumitada Takahashi and Phil Keys in the Nikkei Electronics Asia magazine (Japan). “User-Generated Devices (UGD), allowing people to enjoy themselves making their own equipment with…
The built environment is now the largest negative factor in the stability of ecosystems and the climate. As populations become increasingly urbanized, the evolution of cities will largely shape the outcome of our long dependence on natural resources. Recognising the need and opportunity to improve…
Nicolas Nova reports today on a lecture by Johanna Brewer about “What can ethnography do for technology?â€. Brewer, who is a PhD candidate in the Informatics department at the University of California, Irvine and a collaborator of Paul Dourish in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing…
The non-profit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) yesterday launched a new laboratory to enable innovation in higher education. The lab will support the design of solutions that increase college attainment levels, enhance the college student experience and improve the quality and effectiveness of the U.S. higher…
“Bringing the everyday life of people into design” is the title of a doctoral dissertation that Froukje Sleeswijk Visser is defending today to obtain her doctoral degree in industrial design engineering at the Technical University Delft. Summary Products play a role in our everyday lives.…
At the Future of the Internet conference in Prague today, Gemalto, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips announced a new initiative that will address the fundamental societal issue of trust in new and emerging digital services. The initiative aims to bring European public and private stakeholders…
Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The next-generation Internet’s impact on business, governance and social interaction J.D. Lasica The Aspen Institute, 2009 Smart Mobs reports: “Recently, The Aspen Institute has published an eBook which some say is possibly the best report on cloud computing…
A special issue of Journal of Business Strategy on ‘The practice of innovation: design in process’, is now available. There is a great deal of energetic discussion about why design innovation has become critical for the success and growth of businesses today and experts in…
One of the sessions at UbiComp 2008, the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous computing (Seoul, Korea), was devoted to design and ethnography. The four papers are all in the proceedings, but (except for the first one) you will need an ACM membership to download them.…
Daniel Kaplan, CEO of the French Next-Generation Internet Foundation (FING) and one of the driving forces behind the upcoming LIFT conference in Marseilles, France, has published three long essays with an excellent critique of the Internet of Things. If you understand French, they are highly…
In an article on A List Apart, Derek Powazek explores what it means to connect the ideas of James Surowiecki, expressed in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, to the social web where, he says, they can reach their full potential. “The Wisdom of Crowds…
Anand Giridharadas, South Asia correspondent at International Herald Tribune, describes what makes the cellphone special in India, and what it means for democracy. “The cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the…
If you like the writings by the highly original Elizabeth Churchill, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research in charge of the Internet Experiences Group — and I definitely do! — then this Spring has been a particularly rewarding period. Here are some of the…
Most of the videos of the Interaction09 conference, that took place this February in Vancouver, Canada, are now available online (see also here). Here is a personal selection: Kars Alfrink: Play in social and tangible interactions Many of the interactions seen in tangible and social…
Andrew Dillon, dean of the School of Information (“iSchool”) at the University of Texas, writes on his blog InfoMatters that he finds “the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore”, since “truly understanding the user seems beyond both established methods and established practices.” “The…
In December last year, Intel design researcher Daria Loi made a very strong presentation at the UPA Europe conference showing how people in different cultures “keep, protect and find what they value”. She and others in her team actually went into the homes of people…
In a series of predictions on the future of collaboration, Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, points out that it’s the user experience that matters. “We need to provide an experience that’s consistent and seamless, with easy access to the services you…
The latest issue of Vodafone’s Receiver Magazine is entitled “Seizing the Moment”: “Bending and transcending the constraints of time and space has gotten easy for us. With our mobiles and netbooks, we’re about to create a social setting in which communication and self-expression are possible…
Over the past few months, frog design’s Robert Fabricant has been “busy riling up the design community with a theory that designers are now in the ‘behavior business’”. “Innovation is not just about putting the right new feature into a product and getting it…
Steve Wolak is the founder and head of the Betavine, Vodafone’s developer outreach website — recently much heralded by Vodafone’s CEO Vittorio Colao — and he just started blogging. His central question: “Crowdsourcing, open and collaborative innovation, the long tail, wikinomics … what does it…
Nokia’s IdeasProject site features a video interview with Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, where he argues that that communications technology is leading us back to the kind of participation economy that existed before the industrial revolution in that a great product or service is no…
danah boyd (blog), a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was one of the featured speakers at the April 18 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, an annual one-day…
This document from the UK Department for Health outlines the benefits that local authorities, and their residents, enjoy when they work with user-led organisations. Benefits range from helping local authorities deliver greater personalisation to improved engagement with hard-to-reach population groups. User led organizations are led…
Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton calls for engineers and user-experience designers to learn to appreciate one another: “End-user satisfaction and quality of experience need to be the fundamental pillars of any worthy company’s value system. Hence organizations must be structured in a way that…
NESTA, the UK Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, just announced that it has undertaken research which leads it to believe the UK is unprepared for ageing. Just under a third of all pensioners live on or close to the poverty line and twelve…
Today, Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Warwick Thompson announced the winners and finalists of the 2009 National Design Awards, which recognise excellence across a variety of disciplines. The 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award – given in recognition of an individual who has made a profound, long-term contribution to…
Today I spent some time looking through the CHI 2009 papers. Here is a personal selection (and you need an ACM membership to access them): A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India Neil Patel, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput, Amit…
Tim McCoy of Cooper thinks it is, at least as a service offering and a career path. “IDEO’s Bill Moggridge made a comment last week after a screening of Objectified that hit close to home. To paraphrase, he said interaction design has become pervasive, that…
anthrodesign is a Yahoo! group of (currently 1693) individuals interested in the role of applied anthropology in the corporate, public sector, and medical contexts. A recent contribution by Russ Nelson of Conifer Research is worth reproducing here: Enough adults now have profiles on social networking…
From an article on eHealthNews: “The software developers at Siemens Healthcare have come up with something special for customers employing Siemens PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) and RIS (Radiology Information System) software: Clinical staff members process their specific tasks via “role-based portals”. These portal…