Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Mark Ury contacted me the other day. He is the chief experience architect for Blast Radius and has a very good blog, entitled “The Restless Mind“, that features the kind of “slow” insightful writing that I really enjoy. Take a look at some of his…
As keynote speaker at the IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool puts his foot in it: Jared Spool, the IA Summit 2008 keynote speaker, posited the idea that UCD was an out-dated methodology that should be retired by the UX community. Why? According to Spool ,…
Joanna Bawa, editor of Usability News, has published a short review of the CHI conference. She appreciated that the main feeling of the conference was more closely allied to design, as clearly expressed by Irene McAra McWilliam and Bill Buxton. But it was hard to…
City of Sound has published an excellent overview of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. “Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in…
All videos of the conferences at the Bruce Sterling curated Share Festival that recently took place in Turin, Italy, are now online. Aside from Bruce Sterling, exhilarating discussants were Massimo Banzi, Julian Bleecker, Donald Norman and Marcos Novak, to name just a few. Manufacturing: From…
Fast Company interviews Gartner researcher Tom Austin on why your head of IT should be a cultural anthropologist and why you should think twice before you block YouTube. “A new species of Information Technologist is emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0 — social…
The April issue of UXmatters just came out: Winning content persuades, not manipulates by Colleen Jones Elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion. Designing ethical experiences: some practical…
Daniel Lende wrote a good annotated summary of the New York Times magazine feature of Jan Chipchase, on the “Neuroanthropology” blog. He thinks the “world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us,…
Sohrab Vossoughi, the founder and president of ZIBA Design, argues in an article for Business Week that companies are flourishing when they try to create holistic experiences by emotionally engaging their consumers. “Advances in manufacturing technology and the global reach of the Internet have leveled…
Julian Bleecker has decided to join Nokia’s Design Strategic Projects Studio. Julian and (LIFT conference‘s) Nicolas Nova are the co-founders of the Near Future Laboratory where client work focuses on developing emerging and conceptual design-technology for new interactive experiences. Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns are…
The Chipchase hype has hit the New York Times Magazine. Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase is becoming very popular. Just a day after the Economist, now one of the world’s top newspapers has published a 6,000 word feature on him, in its highly regarded Magazine…
The Economist asked Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages. The video is part of The Economist special report on mobility and “digital nomads”. Watch video
On Apr. 9, France Telecom’s Orange mobile, Internet, and TV unit unveiled a service [“Orange Cinéma Séries“], set to be introduced in the fourth quarter of this year, that will let subscribers get premium movies from Warner Brothers and HBO and swap them among their…
Last year’s conference “Innovation Forum Interaction Design” focused on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Speakers included Gillian Crampton Smith, Anthony Dunne, Tim…
Idris Mootee, a business and innovation strategist, explores in a very casually written post the relevance of authenticity in experience design. How about everyday experiences? Often these little experiences (digital or real world) are not engineered to be great, but somehow they find a way…
Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations (see also these posts), argues in a short essay that the future of Europe lies in email: “The EU is the test case for the effects of the Internet on…
The Economist newspaper has published a special report on mobility, wondering what the social effects will be. Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog). Our nomadic future [leader article] “Prepare to see…
Luca Chittaro (blog) of Il Sole 24 Ore’s Novà just published his last three CHI 2008 interviews: Talking cars A collaboration between Toyota and Stanford University is experimenting a talking car interface that does much more than navigation, providing safety advice to drivers. Ing-Marie Jonsson…
Henning Fischer of Adaptive Path recently had an email conversation with Peter Coughlan, Partner and Transformation Practice Lead at IDEO. They discussed IDEO’s transformation practice and his team’s processes to create a more human-centered design. Read interview
The MIT Media Laboratory and Bank of America today announced the creation of the Center for Future Banking, a five-year collaboration to which Bank of America has committed $3-5 million annually. The new research center, which will be located at the Media Lab on the…
Luca Chittaro (blog), who covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, continues with his gruelling pace of interviews. Here is another batch: Technology among the homeless We tend to believe that technology…
According to Tom Stewart, the new version of ISO 13407, the International Standard for Human Centred Design (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards), will use the term “user experience”. Stewart is the Chair of the sub-committee…
Architecture and design magazine Icon has published a 4 page article on video ethnography in its latest issue. “The video ethnographers’ findings are gold dust to their clients and video ethnography has become one of the fashionable research techniques that any forward-looking design company now…
Luca Chittaro (blog), who covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, continues his hectic schedule of interviews: It’s all about the (digital) money Interview with Scott Mainwaring (Intel Research) Be they US…
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, has written a long post about making sense of value in a world in which many digital goods are available for free. “The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every…
The Norwegian Design Council is organising a European Business Conference on Inclusive Design, 5-6 May in Oslo, Norway. Would you like to know how inclusive design can help you create new products and services? How design methods can take you closer to the customer and…
The latest David Report bulletin, called “I shop therefore I am”, looks into the world of consumer culture from different point of views; ethical, social, political, economical and humanistic. Shopping has turned into a lifestyle. We consume as leisure and a way to pass time.…
Business Week reports on how Indians are using their cell phones as a “one-stop shop” for everything from e-mailing to banking. A growing group of Indian consumers who want more from their phone than just talk time. […] Indians spent some $250 million on extra…
Luca Chittaro (blog), a professor at the University of Udine, covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà , the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper. He is already at the pre-conference workshops where he is publishing interviews faster than we…
Matt Jones used to be director of user-experience design at Nokia. Now he is the co-founder of Dopplr, a social networking site for frequent travellers. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path recently had a long conversation with him that you can read a summary of on…
The UK Department for Children, Schools and Families launched last week its eagerly anticipated Byron Review into Children and New Technology. It contains a comprehensive package of measures to help children and young people make the most of the internet and video games, while protecting…
Paul Marks examines in the New Scientist how far people are prepared to go in accepting robots as social partners. “Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He’s…
Firefox 3 hasn’t even launched yet, and the talk is already moving to Firefox 4. Mozilla Lab’s push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it’s running on, and also more hooked into Web…
Trendwatching published a feature post about status-yielding stories. Their central thesis: As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren’t known to the masses, and as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will…
Luca Chittaro will keep a running blog (in English and Italian) during CHI 2008 where he promises “news, interviews with internationally-known researchers, and the latest trends and discoveries in human-computer interaction”. Chittaro, who is a professor at the University of Udine, also writes for Novà ,…
“By 2020 the terms ‘interface’ and ‘user’ will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans,” is the first sentence of a short article on the BBC News site. According to the BBC, “it is one of the predictions in a Microsoft-backed report drawn…
It’s all over the Italian press (the winners) and the Turkish press (the losers), and on a small number of international news outlets: Milan will host the 2015 Universal Exposition (a.k.a. “Expo” or “World Fair”). In a day and age when Universal Expositions are no…
Next week on 8 and 9 April I will be at CHI 2008, the international conference that this year is taking place in Florence, Italy. On Wednesday afternoon you can find me in the panel on Interactions Magazine, that Richard Anderson invited me on. If…
The New York Times writes about a new wave of Silicon Valley companies that are bringing live socializing into online social networking Web sites: Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. People visit each other’s MySpace…
Last week I wrote about Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations. Now WorldChanging has published an extensive interview that Jon Lebkowski did with him: Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as…