Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
During the Agile 2008 conference, Amr Elssamadisy interviewed Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and supporter of interaction design. He talked about his contact with the Agile movement and the similarities discovered between Agile programmers and interaction designers. Alan is the author of two…
Consulting firm McKinsey has just launched a new website, called What Matters, that is an extensive collection of essays and interviews with opinion formers around the world. The content is categorized into ten big topics: Biotechnology, Climate Change, Credit Crisis, Energy, Geopolitics, Globalization, Health care,…
Jamie Owen, a visual information specialist for a training arm of the USA Department of Veterans Affairs argues on Boxes and Arrows that thinking outside of our own cultural influences can strengthen our design decisions. “The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or…
Jennifer Bove, a former Interaction-Ivrea student, sent me a link to a case study on a gestural entertainment center that she and a team at Kicker Studio developed for camera maker Canesta: Canesta, Inc. is the inventor of revolutionary, low-cost electronic perception technology that enables…
The Independent today introduced SustainIT, the first in a series of three monthly supplements on ICT and globalisation. Some of the articles in the supplement (especially those not written by sponsor BT staff) are a treat: Corporate social responsibility is vital for business survival Corporate…
Tactical Tech is an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work. They believe that new technologies have significant potential to enhance the work of campaigners and advocates, giving them the tools to…
Jukka Jouhki (blog), an anthropologist and post-doc researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has a particular interest in technology. He is currently doing research on South Korean new media culture (2006-2009), human-technology interaction, cultural aspects of new…
danah boyd, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just joined Microsoft Research New England. On 29 February, she gave her first talk at Microsoft since joining the company. This talk, entitled “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?”…
Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of Jump Associates, argues in Business Week that knowing the wants of your customers is more important than out-innovating your competitors. It’s become fashionable in the last decade to prescribe innovation as the cure for every ill facing business.…
One of those things hard to achieve with conferences is a good atmosphere. The recent LIFT conference in Geneva, Switzerland clearly has it down to a science: logistics were so well taken care of that you hardly noticed them (the tech worked, the WiFi was…
The final session of the 2009 LIFT conference was about new frontiers, devoted to people who are pushing the envelope, and reinventing their fields in the process. Melanie Rieback discussed the evolution of security with regards to RFIDs. Creating the future is also a matter…
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: This device we make in our own image changes everything Renowned computational biologist and educational innovator James Bower believes the Internet, rather than representing some new stage in human development, has simply caught up with the ways people actually…
Randall Stross is a New York Times staff writer, who expands on the issue of privacy in an era of social networking — a topic which has also been addressed pointedly and extremely eloquently by Bill Thompson last week at the LIFT conference. “The popularity…
The New York Times Magazine on the service design concept behind car sharing: “Car sharing, is a pay-per-use system, which has the effect of significantly altering driving behavior. Evidence suggests that sharers drive from a quarter to half as much as owners — a staggering…
Expanding Horizons is a quarterly publication aimed at ICT decision-makers in the private and public sectors. It explores the socio-economic benefits that mobile technology offers as well as best practices from around the world in order to encourage affordable mobile communications and bring Internet to…
The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries, including those who are increasingly consuming computing technologies and services, as well as those for whom access to computing technologies remains largely out…
Alexa Andrzejewski of Adaptive Path reflects on the user experience of money: For anyone designing for consumer finance — banking, investing, billpay, money management tools, insurance providers or any business selling “savings†as a value proposition (as a consultant, I’ve learned a lot through having…
The session devoted to Design Thinking was my personal favourite of the entire 2009 LIFT conference. Beyond the engineers and business’ discourse about the future, what is it designers can propose? What sort of alternatives are they envisioning? What’s the role of design thinking in…
More and more content of Interactions Magazine is becoming available online. The latest March-April issue is devoted to trust and “explores the idea of assurance and the feelings of ease or unease related to relationships of confidence or skepticism”. Here are some of the treasures:…
The business channel of The Atlantic Online published this weekend the first of two articles by Grant McCracken on the implications of the recession on consumer habits. This article just deals with three variations of a mere quantitative change. The qualitative change — where consumption…
Get an overview of the thought process and common strategies for generating prototypes from Dave Cronin, Director of Interaction Design at Cooper. Although applied to Fireworks, Cronin’s discourse is general, especially when he talks about his four reasons for creating prototypes: 1. Prototypes make your…
The Guardian published a special section on the role of mobile phones in emerging markets: Nice talking to you … mobile phone use passes milestone A UN report reveals that half the globe now pays to use one, with the fastest growth taking place in…
The last day of the LIFT conference started off with a session devoted to inspiring stories from people with extraordinary projects and lives. Designer Matt Webb talked about the relationship between science-fiction and design, followed by Joerg Jelden, a trend analyst from Trend Buero who…
Microsoft Office Labs is a group within Microsoft that tests ideas by building prototypes and gathering usage data to inform ongoing and future research and development in the productivity space for both work and home. The Labs just launched Canvas for OneNote, a prototype conceived…
The Italian newspaper La Stampa reports today on its front page that Venezuelan president Ugo Chávez is launching an 18 euro ‘phone of the revolution’. Because this story doesn’t seem to be reported in the English-speaking press, here is a quick translation from the (somewhat…
More than half the world’s population now pay to use a mobile phone and nearly a quarter use the internet, according to an ITU report, as reported by Associated Press. Six in 10 people around the world now have cellphone subscriptions, signaling that mobile phones…
Ericsson is getting active in African mobile communications and it’s worth checking out what they are up to (even though they don’t prove much, despite the title of the press release). “Ericsson, the world’s leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services, and pan-African operator Zain…
Microsoft has created a virtual personal assistant that can build a relationship with its user. “Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one. Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen.…
Business Week reports on how a nascent industry involving the likes of Google and Nokia is pinpointing the movements and behaviors of millions of cell-phone users. “Marketers have long dreamed of zeroing in on shoppers, whether in a mall or a competitor’s store, and hitting…
Daniel Kaplan, CEO of the Fing Foundation, presented a quite unique way — a game — to conduct an online survey during a short open stage talk at the 2009 LIFT conference. Sociogeek: How do you expose yourself online? How do you choose your online…
After the project, the collaborative website, the game, now also the booklet. KashKlash is an open forum and web project focusing on alternative economies in a post-money future. What will such a world look like? How will the concept of value be measured? What concepts…
In an interview with Nokia’s IdeasProject renowned cyberlaw scholar Jonathan Zittrain talks about how ubiquitous human computing, which he describes as the ability to treat the human mind as a fungible resource, has enabled companies to attack any number of problems by throwing more minds…
Ethan Zuckerman, a multifaceted thinker whose work focuses on the impact of technology in developing countries, and a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, was interviewed on Ideas Project, the Nokia site that explores “where technology and…
In an interview with Nokia’s IdeasProject, social media innovator Laura Fitton talks about the most basic of human connections: our immediate physical community. This is the kind of intimacy that is built up over numerous ‘unimportant,’ low-level interactions…with the neighbours washing their car, the guy…
One of the best sessions of the entire LIFT conference took place on Thursday afternoon. As half of the world is now living in cities, it’s undeniable that the recombination of our physical environment through technological advancements will lead to unexpected changes, problems but also…
Solidarity was the first afternoon theme of the LIFT conference. One of the subtle change in the last fifteen years revolves around how collective action and solidarity have changed. Ramesh Srinivasan and Juliana Rotich, two speakers from different parts of the world, showrf how technologies…
The entire morning of the first day of the LIFT conference was devoted to change. I selected a few presentations here that I found personally most stimulating. Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in your rss feed. Nicolas Nova…
The other Experientia workshop at LIFT was Lifestream – Visualizing my data. The workshop, which was completely packed, was run by Willem Boijens, Vodafone, and my business partner Jan-Christoph Zoels, Experientia, and set out to explore large quantity information visualization. Boijens and Zoels started off…
We just came back from the LIFT conference and have lots to blog about. Our LIFT experience started off with the KashKlash game, an action-packed workshop that explored alternative methods of exchange [and I helped prepare]. The focus was on a possible future ecosystem –…