Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Stowe Boyd, an internationally recognised authority on social applications and their impact on business, media, and society, published today an interesting reflection on the fact that conversation online has moved away from the blogs that once seemed the nexus: “Basically, conversation is moving from a…
Idris Mootee, a business and innovation strategist, explores the disciplines of service design and experience design through some innovative, authenticity-inspired retail concepts (that in some ways are also reflected in the Eataly supermarket in Torino): “17 years ago, Alain Coumont was putting a large communal…
Hugh Graham asks some serious questions about the role designers in promoting consumer culture, in a wider context of sustainability. “Should designers work toward the end of aspirational consumer culture? Can the design industry, broadly defined, reposition and reinvent itself to provide value and sustainability…
In a few months, Turin will host the World Congress of Architecture, the top architecture event in the world. They have an interesting programme, with some speakers I really like. They are called “Relatori” on their English website, which non-Italians should obviously know means “Speakers”.…
Kate Rutter of Adaptive Path recently interviewed Nathan Shedroff, experience strategist, author, and the Program Chair and founder of the brand new MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. They spoke about the new CCA MBA program, how design and management are…
Last week’s Budget and two policy documents have put design firmly at the heart of the Government’s innovation strategy, reports Emily Pacey in mad.co.uk. “In an orchestrated effort to boost innovation in public services, two Government departments published papers last week that include design –…
One of the statements that stuck with me at the recent Disruptive Thinking event in Barcelona, organised by the Art Center College of Design, was by author Sara Wheeler. She said: “Climate change is now part of the human experience, what it means to be…
Newsweek’s Katie Paul interviews Richard Florida to find out how new ‘creative classes’ are changing cities around the world and what our chosen cities say about us. Here is the introduction: Is it just a cultural quirk that the New York women in “Sex and…
Robert X. Cringely, the pen name of technology journalist Mark Stephens, who is the host and writer of the hit PBS-TV miniseries “Electric Money”, has penned a polemic piece about culture and technology: “There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but…
Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, will be moving to Helsinki in August and begin his new role as “Head of Design Direction with Nokia’s design staff, with a remit for the service and user interface domain.” Says Greenfield: ”…
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations by Clay Shirky is an “examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and…
A new Logitech study concludes that a quarter of European homes only have one person who can work everything. European households are full of expensive gadgetry that most people do not know how to control, according to a recent study. The research commissioned by Logitech…
Knowledge@Wharton reports on a hot controversy: “A tug of war over the future of media may be brewing between so-called user-generated content — including amateurs who produce blogs, video and audio for public consumption — and professional journalists, movie makers and record labels, along with…
The people from the German consultancy Trendbüro published a short interview with Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken on the topic of identity. It is part of their strategy to publicise their forthcoming Trend Day, which has the theme: “Identity Management – Recognition replaces attention”. Mark is…
When Users “Do” the Ubicomp is the great sounding title of an article by Finnish researcher Antti Oulasvirta in the March-April issue of Interactions Magazine. Abstract: Computers have become ubiquitous, but in a different way than envisioned in the 1990s. To master the present-day ubicomp-a…
The International Herald Tribune reports on a new very cheap mobile phone for emerging markets: It looks a bit like a child’s toy, a walkie-talkie circa 1975, a cheap plastic throwback to the good old days when telephones were made for talking. But to Spice…
The UK government is aiming to make the country a global leader in the arts, media and advertising through initiatives including the creation of thousands of new apprenticeships and the launch of a Davos-style world creative business conference. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the culture…
The world of design and innovation has greatly changed in the last decade. The challenges are more complex, more intricate, and more systemic, and therefore require an increasingly holistic and multidisciplinary approach, especially in education. Or in the words of Richard Koshalek, president of the…
There is an interesting controversy going on between 37signals and Donald Norman. It all started with a four-page article in the March 2008 issue of Wired Magazine about 37signals, the company that helped develop much of the software that has enabled Web 2.0, including Ruby…
Today Torino World Design Capital published an interview Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken recently conducted with Bruce Sterling. This time not about spimes, ubiquitous computing or digital fabrication, but about his experience with the city where he lived for the last six months. Bruce likes Torino…
Newsweek claims that the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals: Some of the same entrepreneurs that funded the user-generated revolution are paying professionals to edit and produce online content. In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid…
I am in Barcelona today to attend the Art Center Global Dialogues: Disruptive Thinking event. The one-day conference is set up as “a series of on-stage conversations with internationally renowned thinkers in many fields whose “disruptive†ideas and actions challenge convention, break current paradigms, and…
Darren Waters of BBC News recently visited Nokia’s scientists and researchers at their lab in Palo Alto to talk about the future of mobile phones in three, five and eight years, and also beyond that. The first thing he highlighted is the fact no-one at…
MEX, the PMN Mobile User Experience conference, is a yearly two day strategy forum for the leading minds in mobile telecoms, to be held in London on 27th – 28th May 2008. Every year PMN challenges the mobile telecoms business to respond to the MEX…
Two of the world’s largest environmental organizations, WWF and IUCN, supported by Nokia, are launching today connect2earth.org for young people to tell the world what they think about the environment. Gland, Switzerland, and Espoo, Finland (IUCN, WWF and Nokia) – A new online community where…
If executives are going to rely on the wisdom of the masses for business help, it’s probably time the masses get a little compensation for it. That’s the theory behind Kluster, the newest in a lineup of companies using the Web to channel the collective…
Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey, Reuters reports. While most people think journalism is important to the quality of life, 64 percent…
Although usability engineering as a profession has been developed in the western countries for over twenty years, its development in other parts of the world like China remains relatively unknown. The study reported in this paper seeks to compare the practice of usability professionals in…
The International Herald Tribune has published an article on why it has become more important than ever for mobile phone manufacturers to understand the psyche of consumers and why they pick one phone over another. But the solutions seem disparate and not necessarily on the…
Stephen Wilcox describes in Medical Device Link how ethnographic research, when used correctly, can provide hard data for guiding a device company’s business decisions. The use of ethnographic research has since become much more common in medical device development. However, its relative ubiquity raises an…
The Design Council published a report from a fact-finding tour to the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland that explored how cross-disciplinary teaching and learning is changing the nature of design. The tour members, which were academics and policy makers and also included design consultant and emerging…
Donald Norman is probably one of the most prominent guests at the upcoming Piemonte Share Festival, curated by Bruce Sterling. Norman will be part of a panel on Saturday afternoon 15 March entitled “Manufacturing Future Designs”. The many conferences of the festival are delving into…
“We Think”, the new book by Charles Leadbeater, a UK-based innovation thinker and spokesman for collective creativity, has just been published. Society is based not on mass consumption now but on mass, innovative participation – as is clear in phenomena from Wikipedia, Youtube and Craigslist…
I recently interviewed Prof. Yrjö Sotamaa, President of the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Sotamaa is the man behind the initiative to start a new Innovation University in Finland, by bringing together three Finnish top universities: the University of Art and Design Helsinki (TAIK),…
Gain, the AIGA journal of business and design, seems to be awake again (after a long slumbering period). The latest contribution, entitled Design Meets Research, is by Debbie Millman and Mike Bainbridge, both of Sterling Brands, one of the leading brand identity firms in the…
Very interesting article on the BBC news site on how Nokia is transforming itself from a device manufacturer into a software and services company that monetises its software know-how through selling devices, and the strategic role that research plays in this endeavour. Some UX related…
UXmatters continues to surprise with its thought provoking articles. Bravo for the good work! Applied empathy: a design framework for human needs and desires by Dirk Knemeyer (of Involution Studios and president of UXnet) Part One of this series, Applied Empathy, introduced a design framework…
Former Economist writer, “Long Tail” author and current Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, is pushing another of his disruptive business ideas and preparing the launch of his next book. “Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer…
A new book was published (and is available free online) on what might be happening to our out privacy and ultimately reputation in an age of ubiquitous personal information. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove Yale…
The Washington Post reflects on what it means that there is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. “From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26…