Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A Pew/Internet survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.…
Context-Based Research Group and Carton Donofrio Partners have conducted a joint study on the future of consumerism in a changing economy and conclude that a new “grounded consumer” is emerging from the ashes of the economic meltdown. Press release Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research…
Oliver King, the co-founder and director of the UK service design consultancy Engine, was one of the speakers at this year’s service design symposium at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Service is the act of helping somebody to do something, while design is the…
In a BBC background article on how Microsoft is missing the boat (again) on the latest technology development, Tim Weber points out usability as Microsoft’s main weakness: “The real Achilles heel of Microsoft’s devices was their abysmal user interface – firmly wedded to the look…
Our friends of the UK service design consultancy Live|Work have posted some must read background articles on their website: The case for Service Design by Lavrans Løvlie Most organisations agree that their services should be oriented towards the customer. Why then, does it happen so…
The UK Design Council has just launched a new programme called Public Services by Design. The success of public services is increasingly measured by their ability to provide personalised responses to an ever advancing set of challenges – while operating within tight budgetary constraints. To…
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries. The Institute for Money, Technology and…
Over the last few years many terms have been proposed to describe the future of the internet: pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, physical computing, to the frustration of some. In the end the Internet of Things seems to have won and I am very…
Bruce Sterling looked at the KashKlash questionnaire results and condensed it all into four narrative future scenarios. An excerpt from the last one: But then his son — who had gone into “cloud design,†God help him — started referring to bricks as “brixels.†A…
MIT’s Technology Review reports on how touch interaction on small and large displays could be the next big thing. “Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, the touch screen has gained recognition as a practical interface for computers. In the coming years, we may see…
I am currently watching a live webcast from the World Bank in Washington on mobile banking in emerging markets. If you are near a computer, you might want to check in too (there is 2.3 hours to go at the time of writing – the…
The launch this Sunday of a Putting People First group on Facebook has been quite a success: nearly 250 members in just a couple of days. If you haven’t yet joined, do so now, as we hope it will become a rich networking tool, where…
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is available as a whitepaper. “When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it is often said that what…
Designing for Services in Science and Technology-Based Enterprises was an interdisciplinary research project (2006-2007) initiated by Saïd Business School (SBS) at the University of Oxford. The study explored how academics, service designers, and science and technology entrepreneurs understand the designing of services in science and…
A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents. Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the…
Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at the International Herald Tribune, writes this week on visualisation design, which uses advanced software to illustrate complicated data so that we (that’s the 99.99 percent of us without doctorates in applied mathematics) can understand it. “Visualization comes in the form…
As an experiment, we created two new Facebook groups today: Interaction Design Institute Ivrea This group is open to all who ever worked, studied, consulted or visited Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and liked what happened there. It complements an existing and popular email list. Putting…
The Tactical Technology Collective, an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work, has just released “Mobiles in-a-Box“, a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides, and case studies designed to help advocacy organizations…
If you are interested in bottom-up innovation within emerging markets using mobile phones, the recent MobileActive08 conference (more here) in Johannesburg, South Africa generated a wealth of materials. Below are some videos: Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera’s…
Podcamp Barcelona’s Chris Pinchen interviewed Nokia’s Adam Greenfield at Visualizar ’08 (Madrid, Spain) the day after the US elections. Their conversation ranged widely over subjects including corporate Situationism, fear of ubicomp, the technological disparity between everyday life in the US and that in other parts…
Over the last week, I have been helping out Marcia Caines with editing her thoughtful review of the Saint-Etienne design biennial (She helped me out before on editing my piece on the Turin design policy conference). Take a look, it is a very insightful write-up…
A team at IDEO led by Tatyana Mamout and Jessica Hastings has been working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently to develop a toolkit to help NGO’s apply human centered design methodologies to the work they do with small holder farmers. IDE, one…
Ruth Kikin-Gil is the UX Design Lead at Microsoft’s Office Labs, a Microsoft innovation group which focuses on the future of productivity and information work, and an alumnus of the acclaimed Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. In this 20-minute audio interview, Qixing Zheng, a UX advisor…
Very good and long article by Cennydd Bowles on the relation between design and agile development. “For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the…
We all live in a digital world, although it means different things to different people. In her inaugural public lecture as Adelaide’s Thinker in Residence, Intel’s Genevieve Bell will explore how digital technology is shaping our lives, our culture, and our future. Dr Genevieve Bell…
McGraw-Hill is pitching me books and now and then I request a copy because the subject matter interests me greatly. Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World” is such a book. It explains how digital technology has affected the…
The New York Times reports on the privacy issues of our digital communication habits: “A vast sea of digital information [is] being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our…
Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher on the impact of information technology in developing nations, reports on his blog on a recent panel discussion, organised by the Open Society Institute, on new media in authoritarian societies. The discussion started from the premise that our understanding of the…
Some months ago I announced the publication of the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. The book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, investigates “what it means to…
“Patenting will be seen as a limitation of human rights.” “There are no cheaters ’cause in my system cheating is the most positive activity.” “Faulty residents are charged with negligence and sent to live in ‘financially active’ communities.” “[The will be] a never-ending variety of…
Deep Search was a conference on the social, cultural and political implications of search, that took place on 8 November 2008 in Vienna, Austria. “Deep Search” wants to look at the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge. We…
A review of the Shaping the Global Design Agenda conference by Mark Vanderbeeken (Experientia) and Marcia Caines (Cluster) The days after the American presidential election are clearly a period of reflection. Newspapers and magazines are full of thoughtful articles, and conferences seek to define the…
Two major research reports were published last week about digital lifestyles in Europe. EIAA Mediascope Europe 2008 (press release – executive summary) tells you all you want to know about why people are using digital stuff. It is particularly useful if you want to know…
Press release: IBM is announcing a collaborative effort with European Union partners to develop new technology that will help support active aging and prevent cognitive decline in the elderly population. Based on intelligent audio and visual processing and reasoning, the “HERMES Cognitive Care for Active…
The current issue of Vodafone’s Receiver magazine — on space and location — is one of the best yet. Every week the editors invite another thoughtful thinker to contribute an essay on the topic, and this week the honour goes to Anne Galloway. Anne Galloway…
Over 250 participants are expected to attend the first European regional conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) next month. From December 4-6, 2008, the beautiful baroque city of Turin, 2008 World Design Capital, will host the conference, themed “Usability and Design: Cultivating Diversity“, with…
The Denmark-based Center for Sustainable Innovation (blog) is embarking on a new combined research and consultancy project about People Centred Innovation with Base of the Pyramid. The project, which is funded by the Danish Network for Research Based Userdriven Innovation – NfBI, will be exploring…
Adelaide, Australia has a Thinker in Residence programme that “brings world-leading thinkers to live and work in Adelaide to assist in the strategic development and promotion of South Australia.” [Or, what cities and regions have to go through to attract the “creative class”.] The current…
This unusual title is actually a quote by Younghee Jung, a senior design manager at Nokia, who travels around the world on behalf of the company to study how people interact with technology. Younghee was interviewed by the Canadian Woman.ca site for an article that…
DIT-Design in Tourism was an EU-funded project to develop tools suitable for everyday use within the tourism industry and to promote service design competencies from terminology to strategies and concepts. The project has – up till now – not been very well communicated (the site…