Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has written a long reflection on tinkering as a way of knowing following a recent conference on the same topic. It is highly recommended reading: “You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about…
Ulla-Maaria Engeström (Mutanen) of Social Objects, maker of entertaining & educating services such as Thinglink, a free product code for creative work, argues that renting is a much more sustainable concept for luxury than owning: “The idea of luxury typically infers ownership, but perhaps renting…
A long article in US News & World Report describes the current popularity of mass customization: “While retailers have long made money by selling multiple copies of the same pair of pants or mass-produced sneakers, we’re on the verge of a world where every individual…
Hubert Guillaud has written again a short analysis on why it makes no sense at all for companies to create something like intelligent fridges. His main argument is that nobody has any need for such a device. Although the article itself is in French, much…
Kazys Varnelis, director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, has written a very nice essay for Vodafone’s receiver magazine that explores how mediated communication has changed our notion of place, created non-places and now has us darting between simultaneous environments. “A century of modernity was…
The New York Times reports on a nine-person team at Microsoft Research India that assesses whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it. “A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India […] approaches the technology of emerging markets in…
Timo Arnall, a designer working with interactive products and media, runs a design research project that looks at emerging technologies at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. In a new presentation he explores the current shift in technology from screen-based interaction to physical interaction…
Yesterday Genevieve Bell, a highly respected anthropologist and Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group, gave a lecture at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. One of the university’s doctoral student reports: Bell used an ethnographic lens to examine what the Internet might look…
The fourth annual international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) took place in Copenhagen, Denmark last week. As described by Lucy Kimbell, EPIC “brings together those working in organizations for whom ethnography is central to their practice. They might be called designers, design anthropologists, ethnographers,…
On April 23, Donald Norman gave a talk at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago on the “Design of Future Things”. A few weeks ago Jeff Howard published a transcript of this talk. Video (678 mb) and audio (64 mb) are also available. Don…
Nicolas Nova has posted some quick pointers about the relationships between science-fiction and HCI/interaction design on his blog: Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz surveys the different kind of interaction design sci-fi movies envisioned during the past decade. It also interestingly…
Teemu Arina, who will speak at the upcoming Mobile Monday event in Amsterdam, has put a lengthy essay on his blog on the topic “how mobile is changing our society.” “I have a feeling that the question we pose today is wrong. It’s not about…
Marc Hassenzahl is Junior Professor for Economic Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He is also a freelance usability consultant, president of the German Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, and the author of over 30 journal papers / book chapters. Two…
Jonathan Follett of Hot Knife Design is a prolific writer. His latest article in the October issue of UXmatters addresses the integration of the physical and the virtual in digital input devices: As we create our digital lives—communicating and socializing with others, collecting content for…
The current edition of Vodafone Receiver Magazine is devoted to location and geowebbing, or as they write: “annotating real space digitally and using the world itself as our interface”. Two authors have already contributed on the theme, and more articles are still to come: A…
According to Internet News, handset makers are seeking skilled developers for interactive networking devices and the rise of social networking applications on a smaller screen. Mobile handset makers are on the trail of the next hot smartphone, with features such as online social networking interaction…
Jeff Parks of Boxes and Arrows just posted a lot of material from the recent IDEA Conference (Chicago, 7-9 October), including a 41 slide presentation (pdf) by Aradhana Goel, the service design strategist at IDEO: When we look through the lenses of society (how we…
A month ago I posted about Philips new intimate massager product range. It turns out there was quite a bit of qualitative user testing involved, as you can read in this background article and this interview.
The September edition of the American architecture magazine ArchiTech contains a special section on experience design. The section, which sees experience design as “a new way of thinking, designing, engaging that uses media and architecture to produce immersive spaces”, is I think quite problematic. Experience…
On this blog, we have repeatedly featured the insights of Marko Ahtisaari, the former director of design strategy at Nokia and now director of brand and design at the advertising-supported phone company Blyk, and earlier this year we had the pleasure of working with him…
Carphone Warehouse, the British mobile phone retail chain, in conjunction with the London School of Economics, has released its fifth Mobile Life report, a comprehensive study into the technology usage habits of children and adults in the UK and US. While the press release stresses…
Designers and developers should be consulting their psychologists, says BBC columnist Bill Thompson. “Major sites like Facebook are constantly being redesigned on the basis of little real understanding of how people engage with their computers. Vast amounts of work have been done in our attempt…
Janet Rae-Dupree of the New York Times explores the latest about design thinking: “The word “design” tends to conjure up images of crisp graphics, nicely arranged interiors or pleasing packaging. But a growing cadre of advocates say the world of design has much more to…
The Nokia Research Center has recently published some technical reports that could be interesting for some of our readers: User perception and usability of MyNet concepts Advances in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and web technologies have recently enabled P2P personal and social networking. The key to the…
Mobile Revolutions is a great blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell, that I discovered via Mobile Active. What’s more, she has actually taken the time to write a lengthy, seriously researched and in-depth paper to dwell on the subjects that…
The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID by Rob van Kranenburg Network Notebook #2, September 2008 Report prepared by Rob van Kranenburg for the Institute of Network Cultures with contributions by Sean Dodson The Internet of Things…
Just in case you don’t know, Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken also writes for Core77, the online design magazine. He takes a somewhat different angle there and post items on “Core” that do not really fit with the Putting People First themes. His latest post is…
The Crucible/Microsoft HCI Reading Group at Cambridge University is a journal-reading group dedicated to review and critique of recent theoretical developments in human-computer interaction. In early August, the group discussed a draft manuscript from Paul Dourish (UC, Irvine) and Genevieve Bell (Intel) that is currently…
Nik Baerten, partner of the Belgian foresight consultancy Pantopicon, recently conducted a long interview with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the Design Strategy MBA programme at CCA, information designer, experience strategist, author of Experience Design and Making meaning, and many more things. What do futures studies…
The first LIFT Asia 08 are online. My favourites: Mobiles and the urban poor – Bruce Sterling Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT Asia, about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies to access services like payment, was impressive. But what made it…
User-centred design becomes user-driven innovation when you are dealing with businesses in Central and Northern Europe, and customer-centric marketing when you deal with people working in marketing and branding. Yet these concepts are not at all the same, and share only superficial similarities. Case in…
Europe could take the lead in the next generation of the Internet. In a document entitled “EU Communication on Future Networks and the Internet”, the European Commission has outlined the main steps that Europe has to take to respond to the next wave of the…
Mike Kuniavsky, one of the founders of Adaptive Path and currently principal of the ubiquitous computing device studio ThingM, wrote a (somewhat technical) reflection on his Orange Cone blog about the Internet of Things session at the recent PICNIC conference in Amsterdam. “One of the…
On Dik.nl, you can find quite a lot of Picnic conference videos. (via European Centre for the Experience Economy)
Victor Lombardi was at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, and reports on it on his blog Noise Between Stations. The article reviews presentations by Adam Greenfield (Head of Design Direction, Nokia and keynote speaker), Ruud Ruissaard (Informaat), Chris Fahey (Behavior), Eric Reiss, James Kalbach…
A few days ago, I reposted excerpts from a rather negative piece on Adam Greenfield. Posting such articles is always a difficult call to make, and I am the first to admit that I don’t always make it right. Putting People First is a blog…
Experientia’s senior partner Jan-Christoph Zoels was this week at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam, and has been providing regular reports. Here is his third one, covering the Thursday afternoon sessions: Making Love is Eskil Steenberg (Quel Solaar)’s take on a multi-player story adventure. Imagine seeing…
Is there a point in the evolution of mass market mobile phones that cellular connectivity as we understand it today is perceived not as a core feature, but as an optional extra? Jan Chipchase of Nokia explores convergence, connectivity and dis-connectivity in a new and…