Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A three part series of special reports on Radio France International explored the impact of mobile technology around the world. The transcripts are all online and – if you read French – it is highly recommended reading. The first programme (alternate site) introduces the essential…
Ken Banks argues in an article on PCWorld that mobile technology is showcasing African grassroots innovation at its finest. “Africans are not the passive recipients of technology many people seem to think they are. Indeed, some of the more exciting and innovative mobile services around…
Jonathan Follett, president and CEO of Hot Knife Design, Inc., a Boston based UX and web collaborative, shares his thoughts on the hybrid experience of interacting with on-line data in the physical world, through the mobile geospatial web. The article was published in the current…
Alcatel-Lucent’s Worldwide Lab is an innovative primary research program focused on soliciting the end-user experiences and preferences from the highly coveted teen and young adult market. Lab Members are made up of users from around the world and range in age from pre-teen to young…
“Working through Screens: 100 ideas for envisioning powerful, engaging, and productive user experiences in knowledge work” is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range…
Donald Norman has posted a number of columns/essays on his blog: People are from earth, machines are from outer space [Interactions 2008 column] People are from earth. Machines are from outer space. I don’t know what kind of manners they teach in outer space, but…
Alastair Curtis, Nokia’s chief designer, discusses his design inspirations, coming Nokia devices and how Indian teenagers will influence the future of mobility, in an interview published on Forbes.com. As Nokia’s chief designer, a post the company veteran has held since 2006, he influences the look…
A three-year research project that explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives has just published its report. “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T.…
Michelle Fuller, Director at eDigitalResearch, writes in the Financial Times on the user experience of online banking: With the banking sector moving towards consolidation, it is crucial that customers are understood, reacted to and rewarded for their loyalty. With the UK office of national statistics…
Wired’s Gadget Lab blog contemplates the future of the mobile phone: Buttons are on their way out. Five years from now, it is likely that the mobile phone you will be holding will be a smooth, sleek brick — a piece of metal and plastic…
“How can you rob a bank in a world without money?” wonders science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, one of the collaborators of the new foresight project KashKlash. KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s…
Experientia is often involved in supporting and promoting the Piedmont, Italy territory where it is located. Our latest initiative is Diana, a machine designed to satisfy existing and future needs of the beauty industry, based on an analysis of current trends, which was a winning…
The Washington Post published a long article on how, for every move, mood and bodily function, there’s a website to help you keep track. “Self-disclosure has been redefined online. In Web 2.0, it’s led to blogs and Tweets, Facebook and instant messenger, each developed to…
Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer O’Reilly Media, Inc. Paperback, 268 pages December 3, 2008 ISBN: 0596518390 Promo text: If you want to get started in new era of interaction design, this is the reference you need. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, Designing Gestural…
Last week, Nokia launched its Nokia Life Tools (backgrounder), a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. From the press release: “Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students…
Hilary Cottam is the 2005 UK Designer of the Year and former director of RED [archive site], the meanwhile closed innovation unit of the UK Design Council. I interviewed her last year for Torino World Design Capital site. And she is suddenly hot. She made…
The Nokia Conversations blog reports that one big shift at Nokia is going beyond maps and thinking more about places (locations full of information). Nokia is also going beyond the simple contact card to a more dynamic representation of who people are (people connected to…
MobileActive.org has just released its newest resource, A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media. “In this report we explore the dynamics of the role of mobile phones in enhancing access to and creating information and citizen-produced media. We explore trends in…
The Caryatids (hardcover) by Bruce Sterling Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Del Rey (February 24, 2009) During a speech at Mobile Monday Amsterdam, Bruce Sterling announced his next book “The Caryatids”. According to Sterling, the book which will be published in February, is an “internet of…
An interesting article in Scientific American discusses a new insight about forgetting: although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. “As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we…
The Wall Street Journal reports on how businesses are tapping designers for innovative ideas on management. “When New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center wanted to make the chemotherapy process easier on patients three years ago, it sought help from an unusual place: the design firm…
Last week frog design and IxDA NY organised Tiger.Blam, a public conversation with Nokia’s Jan Chipchase on effective design research in cross-cultural mobile markets, or in other words, how he ‘designs’ his research expeditions. No video or presentation download is as yet available, but several…
In this nearly 27 minute video Bruce Sterling, a leading futurist, speaker, columnist and science fiction writer, shares his vision on where mobile is heading. Preaching his story from a somewhat unconventional place, the pulpit instead of the stage, he managed to silence the audience.…
Two user experience magazines landed on my desk this week. They are available only to subscribers, both in print and online. But subscriptions are relatively cheap. User Experience is the quarterly magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association (membership is a modest 100 USD) and its…
Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM wrote an article on ubiquitous computing user experience design for ACM’s interactions magazine. The user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices—things you see in gadget blogs—is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address ubicomp user experience design as…
A world in which consumers can access movies, music, television programs and other media content from their sofas at the touch of a button is taking shape but you can’t settle into a couch there just yet, according to the Mercury News. The technology and…
Videos of the September LIFT conference in Seoul, Korea are slowly being posted. The latest one is by Jan Chipchase, a well-known Nokia user researcher. “He details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions, trends he identified through the extensive…
The Nordic Innovation Centre recently published a report on user-driven innovation in the Nordic region. The 137 page report describes in detail what user-driven innovation actually is, outlines the current state of affairs in each of the five countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden),…
Simon Pulman-Jones, head of ethnography & innovation at GfK NOP, argues that ethnography can provide unparalleled insight into any given experience from your customers’ point of view, and describes how it is different from ‘normal’ research. The unique value of ethnography is that it reveals…
Adrian Chan, a social media expert and social interaction theorist at Gravity7, makes a nice attempt at setting out a new model for social interaction design. “Social interaction design works by respecting the psychological and social, the ambiguity not the clarity, the unintended not the…
In a long article today, CNN explores the Internet of Things and to some of the thinkers on the topic, including Vint Cerf and Bruce Sterling. It’s called “The Internet of Things” — at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical…
The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money. The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural, psychological, legal, artistic, technological, and…
In a cover article, BrandWeek explores the value of design thinking. While the design-thinking approach may sound rather seat-of-the-pants, the truth is that it’s surprisingly regimented, consisting of three phases: observation, ideation and implementation. […] Focus groups have their place, but in design thinking, observation…
Nokia Open Studios are a design research method for engaging communities in shanty towns. According to Nokia’s senior design manager Younghee Jung, they were set up as a community design competition with the theme of ‘design your ideal mobile phone’, hosted in 3 communities of…
The latest report by UK education innovator Futurelab introduces to the concept of social justice and practices of user-centred design in learning and education, and looks at how theories for changing the world marry up with methods to implement these changes. The best way to…
Somebody else’s phone is a new Nokia campaign advertised in London that does a great job of depicting the life of an early to mid twenty year-old through their text messages, MMS and pictures. (via Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino)
The World as Flatland – Report 1 Designing universal knowledge Gerlinde Schuller Lars Müller Publishers, 2008 ISBN 978-3-03778-149-4 Knowledge is power. If one possesses a collection of the “universal knowledge” of the world, one has ultimate power. Establishing comprehensive, global collections of knowledge already fascinated…
CNN reports on how Donald Norman wants designers to be more inclusive: The future of design could see the divide between able-bodied and disabled people vanish. Don Norman , design Professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, and the author of ”The Design of Future Things,”…
The latest publication of the UK think tank Demos looks at the future of social networks and the civil implications they are bringing about: Humans are social animals, spinning intricate webs of relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbours and enemies. These networks have always been with…