Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The Plenitude Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff Rich Gold Foreword by John Maeda MIT Press, September 2007 We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound—composed of tens,…
The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Foundation has published a report on a study on how teenagers use news sites. “The NAA Foundation and the Media Management Center at Northwestern University have teamed up to explore and put to the test better ways to match…
After a short hiatus, Vodafone’s Receiver Magazine is updated again with a series of articles under the heading “Seizing the Moment”. The first one in the series is by mobile apps thought-leader Paul Golding, who talks about the user experience of always-connected widgets. “We are…
Fronteer Strategy, an Amsterdam-based management strategy consulting firm, has published a short (6-page) paper on co-creation, in which they argue that there are four types of co-creation and five guiding principles to any successful Co-creation venture: The four types of co-creation Club of experts: A…
For months now, I have been running with this simple thesis in my head: “We are all hackers now”, and again, again and again I notice it getting confirmed. The latest confirmation comes from The Institute for the Future, which for the last six months…
As a contributing editor for Interactions Magazine, Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken was tasked with finding clever people to write a story for the magazine. His first choice was Bruce Sterling. Bruce accepted and wrote a wonderful contribution — much appreciated by the editors — that…
Today was the Africa Gathering in London and ICT4D, an Austrian NGO dealing with ICT for development, has done an excellent job at summarising them: Summaries 1 David Hollow – ICT4D Collective / RHUL * The $100 laptop in Ethiopia – A case study Nkeiru…
The latest issue of Interfaces Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Interaction, the specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS), is all devoted to interaction in the real world. Table of contents • View from the chair by Russell Beale • Preparations for…
Yesterday, the European Commission launched a public consultation on design and innovation on the basis of a recent Commission staff working document on “Design as a driver of user-centred innovation“. The aim of the public consultation on design and innovation is to find out what…
What on earth are anthropologists doing playing with mobile phones, asks Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and creator of FrontlineSMS. “It’s widely recognised that projects can succeed or fail on the realisation of their relative impacts on target communities, and development anthropology is seen as…
BBC technology reporter Maggie Shiels reflects on the quality of the mobile net experience. The article contains many quotes from industry representatives, but offers, I think, little insight. Read full story
Nokia’s IdeasProject site contains this week a video interview with Don Tapscott, and four feature articles that integrate some of the ideas presented thus far on the site: Head in the Cloud: computing becomes virtual As the costs of sending, storing, and processing information descend,…
AP published an interview with Julie Larson-Green, head of Windows Experience and in charge of Windows 7, the next version of Windows for PCs. “The primary things that help you create a good user experience are empathy, and being able to put yourself in the…
Research ICT Africa!, a network of universities and research institutions from 19 African countries, has a site with some interesting research papers and presentations: Mobile telephony access and usage in Africa (2009) Chabossou, A., Stork, C., Stork, M., Zahonogo. Z. Towards evidence-based policy in Africa:…
Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times Magazine on why Twitter is a trap. “These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of…
In December last year, the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) organised its first European conference in Turin, Italy, with a focus on the connection between usability and design. The very successful conference, which was chaired by the UPA Europe president Silvia Zimmerman (who has meanwhile become…
Jeremy Faludi has compiled — in an article for Core77 00 a synthesis of the work of Stanford lecturer and researcher BJ Fogg on the field of persuasive design, and applies his insights to the field of sustainability: “Persuasion is a science; newborn and inexact,…
Elizabeth Goodman of the UC Berkeley School of Information made a presentation on the past and future of environmental issues and HCI at the recent CHI conference: A review of the past decade of human-computer interaction relating to environmental issues identifies three discourses whose commitments…
Carla Diana reports on Core77 at length about the highly conceptual CHI presentation/panel “Eek! A Mouse! Organic User Interfaces: Tangible, Transitive Materials and Programmable Reality“, where heavy hitters presented their own visions of how computing devices will move away from the keyboard and mouse and…
Nokia’s IdeasProject website is intriguing. A content focused platform focused on high level discourse, it contains interviews with thought leaders in communications technology and disruptive ideas, and get’s updated on a nearly weekly basis (recently with venture capitalist Jeff Clavier – press release). Curiously they…
Matt Jones (of Dopplr) gave a talk recently on seduction at the Sensing and Sensuality conference at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. It’s all about seductive data visualisation. But as per usual, impossible to summarise. And as per usual, highly recommendable. Download talk
UCL (which is the abbreviation for “University College London” although you have to look at the site‘s footer to find out) is starting a new MA in Digital Anthropology. And it seems serious stuff. Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to…
The current paradigm of creating of serious news stories — through newspapers and big media — is under threat. Here is a haul of background on the matter (from today’s stories): ‘Hyperlocal’ web sites deliver news without newspapers [The New York Times] Just as…
Last month I announced that the next LIFT conference would take place in Marseilles, France on 18-20 June this year. Entrepreneurs, researchers, artists, designers, and activists who are inventing radically new ways to innovate, design, produce, trade, exchange and manage, will be coming to LIFT…
Last week, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative organised a workshop on the “Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development” in Maputo, Mozambique. The workshop set out to understand the specific challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver…
An EU-wide study of emerging technologies led by Leicester’s De Montfort University aims to alert policy makers to any potential social and ethical problems New technology is changing the way we live and work so quickly that it is easy to overlook the social and…
Canadian designer and computer scientist Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Last month Bill gave a good 20-min keynote at Mix09 that kicked off a longer keynote by Scott Guthrie (corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division). Bill Buxton is the author…
Healthcare organisations are throwing mobile technology at problems without fully considering the underlying business processes or the working conditions of the end-user. This is the key finding of a multi-country report across the healthcare sector from industry analysts Quocirca. It was commissioned by Anoto,…
Chris Lawer underlines that is important to identify that co-creation is not just about firms improving their social marketing, open innovation, community-building and learning efforts to generate new proprietary and valuable knowledge with/from their customers. Rather, there is also a form of co-creation that is…
A controversial post by Sam Ladner, followed by a rich debate between the author, Paula Thornton, Peter Merholz, Raymond Pirouz, and others. Design is attractive to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique of managerial practices. Design thinking…
The latest newsletter of the Service Design Network is out and the content is highly stimulating. A selection: Thinkpublic: Video on Co-Design Thinkpublic have recently released a four-minute overview on co-design on their website. It introduces the concept to all laymen and everyone interested. The…
Microsoft just published a rather thorough report on the future developments of the internet across Europe. In the report, Microsoft analyses the differences in broadband penetration levels across Europe, examines the causes fuelling the growth of Internet adoption, assesses the impact of consumers’ evolving online…
Religious technology may seem like an oxymoron, but as more people obtain mobile phones, iPhones and other devices to help them manage their lives, it’s only natural that many of them will be using their gadgets to help them enrich their spiritual life as well.…
Jeff Howard draws attention to a recent service design paper by Daniela Sangiorgi of Lancaster University: “Dr. Daniela Sangiorgi’s 2008 presentation from ISDN3 just came across my radar. It’s on Service Design as the Design of Activity Systems (pdf 2.1MB). [Audio] Here’s Sangiorgi on a…
ACM reports that “a top researcher for Nokia Design [addressed] the need for effective cross-culture design research when developing informed and inspired designs for future mobile technologies. Jan Chipchase, who studies how people around the world behave, communicate, and interact with each other, [was] an…
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: Social media may have unforeseen limits John Jordan, a pathbreaking tech consultant and academic, measures social technologies in terms of the notion of ‘network externalities,’ which posits that the value of a technology improves as it reaches a critical…
Rich Ling is a sociologist at the Telenor research institute and a visiting professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, who is particularly interested in understanding the social implications of mobile telephony. He just posted a short paper on the rise of mobile divides, that…
Nick Marsh of Engine Service Design outlines some of his experiences developing service principles: “For the purposes of this discussion, I’m assuming that principles are creative generalisations that form the basis of further reasoning or conduct. Normally, these are expressed as short sentences, and sometimes…
Grand Old Man of HCI, Jack Carroll, explains the history of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and how the field gave birth to User Experience and Interaction Design. Few people know the history of fields like UX, IxD, Usability and Human-Centered Design as Jack does. His article…
Richard Heeks reflects in the latest edition of “Communications of the ACM” on how information technology can be best applied to address problems and provide opportunities for inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries. “In terms of IT, the three key priorities are mobiles, mobiles, and…