“Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been intriguing pilot projects and lab experiments, but nothing that justified the extra cost to consumers.

Today, despite the spread of broadband Internet and home networks, consumers remain deeply skeptical about smart-home technology, according to a new study that will be released on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.”

- Read full story (New York Times Bits blog)
- Read full story (International Herald Tribune)
- Read press release
- Download executive summary

“The premise of the fortune at the base of the pyramid (BoP) is based on the notion of how to profitably do business with the poor. But few such endeavours have become sustainable businesses, falling prey to bad assumptions, misguided marketing, or poor research.” [...]

“Using the 5D’s—development, design, distribution, demand and dignity—can provide a roadmap for a cohesive, human-centered strategy for well-designed products that sell, services that are successful, and programs with low drop-out rates. Observation and user research conducted to understand your new target audience is critical in establishing the relevant value propositions.”

Read full story

What big ideas will matter most? What technologies and applications will enable to most disruptive changes? How can our communications and interactions have the most positive impact? Where are the best opportunities for inventors and entrepreneurs? What does it mean? Where are we headed next?

IdeasProject, a project of Nokia, brings together the most visionary and influential ‘big thinkers’ to contemplate exactly these questions, in a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering not only the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications, but also the connections these disruptive ideas. The conversation contemplates what technologies, applications and themes will most change out culture and communications — and shows us the ideas, the people, and how their ideas are connected - sometimes in the most surprising ways.

This site makes the best and most insightful contributions and connections from thinkers across the digital world available. Over time, we plan to add more content and contributors, as well as build in more capabilities to enable a deeper level of participation site visitors.

People featured are Chris Anderson (editor, Wired Magazine), Yochai Benkler (professor, Harvard University), Ron Conway (special partner, Baseline Ventures), Peter Diamandis (chairman & CEO, XPRIZE Foundation), Esther Dyson (chairman, EDventure Holdings), Dewayne Hendricks (CEO, Tetherless), Carl Hewitt (associate professor, MIT), David Hornik (partner, August Capital), Ari Jaaksi (VP of Maemo software, Nokia), Loic Le Meur (CEO, Seesmic), Jerry Michalski (consultant, Sociate), Leonard Shustek (chairman, Computer History Museum), and Vernor Vinge (science fiction author).

You can also browse the site (which contains many links to external content)

• by theme: Business/Investing, Enabling Technologies, Deep Thoughts, New Applications, Impact, and Experience;
   
• by technology: Cloud Computing, DNA Sequencing, Entrepreneurial space initiatives, Global Brain, Internet Applications, Internet of Things, Localizers, Location-based services, Microprocessor Density, Mobile devices, Mobile video, Multi-core Microprocessors, Online Advertising, Page Rank, Smartdust, Social media, Storage Virtualization, and Wireless networks; and
   
• by idea: A world of connected objects; All applications will be social; An economy based on ‘free’; Cloud computing is disruptive technology; Evolving into space; Genetic information is extremely disruptive; Making computing location-independent; Moore’s Law; Sharing changes everything; Social production; Superhumanly intelligent critters; The Internet and the real world become the same place; We are inventing a global brain; and The Internet of things

The site comes with its own YouTube channel and blog.

(via Nokia Conversations)

The purpose of this essay is to build on [earlier work done by a significant number of groups at the intersection of design and futures], and describe how the relationship between design and futures could be deepened to the benefit of both communities. A closer collaboration, and even more important a hybrid practice that drew on each, would improve product design, profoundly change the way we interact with the future, and create the tools to deal with some of the most critical problems of the 21st century.

I approach this from two directions. First, I describe how design can improve futures. In particular, I argue, research techniques developed by designers– particularly their close attention to human-device interaction– could sharpen thinking about, and forecasting of, the future of technology. Second, I describe the contribution futures can make to design. A combination of new technologies and challenges, I contend, are creating an opportunity to design products that can guide people to make better-informed choices about how they can be used, to reinforce behaviors that help users reach long-term goals, and to create a heightened awareness of the future.

This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century– problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

Read essay

The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre of a 1930s-style depression), with rich countries being the biggest losers, and this slowly unfolding reality will drastically transform our societies and our lifestyles, our values and our choices.

In a recent article on the cultural shift currently taking place in the US, Paul Harris paints a dire picture. But he also starts defining the values that define our new world: a rejection of luxury and excess replaced by a new sense of frugalism (which doesn’t necessarily mean quality), a renewed attention on the lives of ordinary people, a greater focus on community and an end to individualism as the dominant cultural, social and economic idea.

“America,” he says, “now is more frugal, less consumerist and more community-minded. But it is also poorer, angry and afraid.”

Reflecting on this from a European perspective, where communities are traditionally stronger, as is the role of government and the public sphere, I can see the following seven clusters of values taking shape:

• A shift in the price/value balance when buying products or services. An entirely different logic comes into play now. When people are tight with money, they want their basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) to be addressed in the cheapest possible way, whereas other higher level acquisitions are only done when the vendor can guarantee security, durability and long-term value. This applies also to corporate purchases. The throw-away culture is grinding to a halt;
   
• A shift in needs: what seemed liked needs just half a year ago, are no longer perceived as such. There is a back to basics and a no frills culture, but it is not yet clear what that might imply on a larger scale, as things are evolving quicly and little research exists;
   
• A renewed focus on people’s physical community: your neighbourhood, town, core friends and family - the people who are always there and can help you out if needed. You look for company when you are in trouble;
   
• When people are spending more times in their physical communities, their demands for good infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy are bound to increase, and these will need to be met by various Public Works-like public programmes;
   
• But it’s not just the hardware that matters. There will also be an increased demand on public institutions to deliver good services. The excesses of politicians and public servants are no longer tolerated during times of scarcity. People will demand effective policy making, good public administration, and little waste of their tax money. Many politicians, too steeped in their world of political games, have not yet understood this. Friction is bound to occur. Social and service design are bound to increase (read this article by Alice Rawsthorn);
   
• Increased demand on companies: companies will have to listen more and help people achieve their goals. Modesty and long term commitment are more important than ever (which is surprisingly similar to the discourse one can hear in emerging markets);
   
• A fundamental questioning of the growth paradigm: the paradigm of everlasting growth in a limited ecosystem has proven to be a fallacy. Most people - who see their real incomes decline and an environment in increasing disrepair - are not hard to convince of this. What this will imply, remains to be determined and invented, but changes are bound to be dramatic. The Slow Food movement provides one possible way of looking at the future, but also they will need to become less elitist and more down-to-earth.

Understanding this new context, these new (or old) values and needs, and helping companies and institutions to create products and services that address them, is the job of people who do people-centred design.

Each of the seven clusters above provide opportunities for down to earth companies who care about the people that buy what they create, and to public institutions that have a serious commitment to their constituents.

We, people-centred designers, will need to reinvent our trade. We will have to create a sharp vision, a fresh methodology, a bare bones consultancy model, and a clear value proposition within this new context.

We often pride ourselves on understanding the needs and contexts of people and helping companies to design products and services around them. This approach is now more needed that ever, but needs and contexts have changed tremendously. Can we deliver on this new challenge?

Probably not all of us, but our basic paradigm is strong and more relevant than ever.

Read also the following articles on the same topic:
- by Michael Bierut
- by Brandon Schauer

Putting People First (PPF) started out some years ago as a dumping ground for all kinds of articles and readings that I found interesting and worthwhile sharing. It gradually became a much more precise resource, focused on user-centred design and experience design and has found a loyal following of over 6,500 readers per day since. Articles are often reposted automatically, including on uxnet.org.

Core77 was added later on: it became the place for me to post everything that didn’t fit on PPF and was design related. The only negative: Core77 doesn’t provide me with a feed of just my articles.

But now there is also Facebook and Twitter, and I am a bit lost.

I am using Facebook primarily for non-private purposes, and post articles and links there that are of interest but would not necessarily post on PPF or Core77. Posting is also incredibly easy, and I have set up feeds from PPF and Twitter so that everything I write - except for Core77 - automatically gets reposted there. You can even see my profile updates without “friending” me, even though that is a bit of a problem with Facebook: it is a reciprocal platform and encourages you to read whatever everyone else updates. Quite often I don’t have the time.

Twitter on the other hand encourages “following”. Many more people are following me than me following people, and that suits me just fine. Except that I don’t know what I should twitter about, or what would make my twittering different from my Facebook updates, my Core77 posts, and my PPF articles.

How are you confronting this?

Probably to be updated.

Abstract:

Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Yet relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/m-payments use.

Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective “adoption” or “impact” research.

Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community.

The paper identifies three crosscutting themes from the broader literature—amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multi-dimensional definition of trust—each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.

- Read paper (preprint version)
- Read review

Now also Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum is publicly advocating the concept of transformation, rather than innovation, as the approach we currently need.

A first post on the matter was written on New Year’s Eve, and is recommended reading not just because of Nussbaum’s thinking itself, but also because of the many and sometimes very polemic comments that various readers have been contributing (many of whom are concerned about the introduction of a new buzz word).

“Transformation” captures the key changes already underway and can help guide us into the future. It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace edifices and big organizations (students already know this, university presidents still have edifice-complexes, which is why so many of them are getting the boot). [...]

The concept of “Transformation” [...] implies radical transformation of our systems—education, health-care, economic growth, transportation, defense, political representation. It puts the focus on people, designing networks and systems off their wants and needs. It relies on humanizing technology, not imposing technology on humans. It approaches uncertainties with a methodology that creates options for new situations and sorts through them for the best quickly.

Most importantly, “Transformation” accepts the notion that we are in a post-consumer society, defined by two groups of economic players: manufacturers and consumers. “Transformation” deals with a new Creativity Society, in which we are all both producers and consumers of value.

In today’s post “The Transformation Conversation” (no comments as of yet), Nussbaum attempts to integrate and structure the debate by a more systematic outline of why he thinks “the concept of “transformation” is of great[er] utility and power than “innovation” at this point in time”.

Unfortunately all of Nussbaum’s examples come from the USA and he presents the concept as an entirely new neologism, with strict relevance to the corporate world, which of course it isn’t.

Even in design, I need only refer to the paper that Colin Burns, Hilary Cottam et al. published in early 2006 - currently available here.

UPDATE: Reaction by Idris Mootee

Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability. What’s missing is that these attributes are means to an end. The real issue is always the user’s physiological feeling of being in control. And control comes in many ways.

Read full story

(via Usability In The News)

“Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of “I can” than “I should,” and never more so than today. Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That’s “I can” thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces. (It’s easier to sell a device with ten features than one.) But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device. [...]

When I welcome my first incoming class this fall, I plan to focus on how RISD’s core ideals of art and design can humanize our advancing technologies. Or, put another way, to focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.”

Read full story

(via Steve Portigal)

This transformation is never complete of course. With a wink to a recent political campaign, it’s also “time for some change” at Interactions Magazine. Five new contributing editors join the magazine, and I am very proud to say that I am one of them. Here are their introductions:

Elaine Ann joins us from Asia. She is the founder of Kaizor Innovation, a strategic innovation consulting company uniquely positioned to help develop appropriate innovation strategies, research, and designs for the emerging Chinese market.

Lauren Serota is a design researcher with Lextant in Columbus, Ohio, where her work incorporates an ever-present passion for cultural diversity and objectivity in the acquisition and analysis of consumer insights for product and service development.

Mark Vanderbeeken is one of four founding partners of the young and dynamic international experience design consultancy Experientia in Italy. Mark is a specialist in visioning, identity development, and strategic communications, as reflected in his wonderful blog, “Putting People First.”

Molly Wright Steenson, forever the “girlwonder,” is an interaction designer and design researcher with roots in Web, mobile, and service design. Molly was an associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Marc Rettig, former chief experience officer at Hanna Hodge, is cofounder of Fit Associates. Marc’s 20-plus-year career has been guided by an interest in people, systems, communication, and the power of design. Marc served as features editor for interactions during the mid-’90s.

The March-April issue will feature my first contribution as contributing editor, followed by a number of guest pieces in the issues after that.

Although most content is not freely available, you can subscribe to the magazine for 55 USD (less than 40 euro). A bargain.

Meanwhile check out the excellent cover story, which is fully online: The washing machine that ate my sari - mistakes in cross-cultural design.

Customers always have problems to solve, even more so in a downturn. This downturn itself is creating a permanent impact on customer needs and at the same time creating new ones. Take ethnographic quick and deep dives and quickly realign your business models to meet their needs. Rethink your business starting with these new opportunities.

Read full story

If you missed the presentations, or if you’d like to hear them again, you can now access the archived presentations and video.

Presentations: Building Agent Networks & Creating Regulatory Space

Video: Introduction and Sessions 1 & 2 and Session 3 (requires RealPlayer)

Introduction by Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of CGAP

Session 1: Driving mass market customer usage
Moderator: Kabir Kumar (CGAP); Panelists: Brian Richardson (WIZZIT, South Africa), Bold Magvan (XacBank, Mongolia)

Session 2: Buildng a viable, motivated network of agents
Moderator: Mark Pickens (CGAP); Panelists: Nick Hughes (Vodafone Group), Sam Kamiti (Equity Bank, Kenya), Carl Johan Rosenquist (c/o Maldives Monetary Authority)

Session 3: Creating and taking advantage of regulatory space
Moderator: Tim Lyman (CGAP); Panelists: Rizza Maniego-Eala (Globe Telecom, Philippines), Abbas Sikander (Tameer Bank, Pakistan)

Here’s a great write-up of the sessions from Patrick Philippe Meier at Tufts.

Currently the country where I live (Italy) is in advanced stages of Facebook hype, with people entrusting large sections of their social lives and personal archives to a private company, which is not even profitable.

Putting your personal or corporate resources on a private company’s website therefore requires a leap of faith, which many are uncomfortable making.

Flickr is a much beloved private company, which was bought by Yahoo! in 2005. The site contains over 2 billion photographs and many, many “Web 2.0″ implementations with people tagging, friending and linking to each other.

The highly respected Library of Congress took notice and decided to launch a highly successful Flickr Commons project, run by senior program manager George Oates, one of the site’s first employees before Yahoo’s 2005 acquisition.

The aim of Flickr Commons is to increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

The Library of Congress was exceptionally pleased about the pilot project, and even published a report on its success.

But a few days ago George Oates got downsized (i.e. she got fired), with no one ready in the wings to step into the running of the Flickr Commons relationships.

It makes you think.

My personal archive is now backed up on Apple’s Time Machine. What does that mean in terms of access in 10, 15, 20 years? I frankly have no idea.

The conference, which took place in Turin, Italy, was inspired by the designation of the city as the first World Design Capital and by the locally grown international movement of Slow Food, to focus on design and the importance of cultural diversity.

Conference participants were enthusiastic about the quality of the presenters and the presentations, the impeccable organisation, the general atmosphere of collaboration, and the many opportunities for informal networking. And let’s not forget the (slow) food.

Many presenters emphasised the need to go beyond usability analysis and to take those insights further into initial design concepts. Also the need for cultural sensitivity was strongly on people’s minds: usability is no longer about localisation of interfaces, but about understanding cultural diversity, which goes far beyond linguistic translations.

Unusually, this conference was paperless. A dedicated and easy-to-use mobile device, called SpotMe, allowed participants to check the schedule, view presentations, find out who is sitting around them, message other conference goers, exchange address information, and be informed about everything else the city has on offer.

Meanwhile nearly all the presentations are available online and they are worthwhile exploring. Indulge yourself on the talks by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research, Chan-il Kim of the Institute of Design, IIT, Mike Glaser of SpankDesign, Michele Visciola of Experientia, Anxo Cereijo Roibàs of Vodafone Global, Giorgio Venturi, Daria Loi of Intel (not yet online), and much, much more.

While you are at it, you may also want to browse the photo gallery, and sniff up the atmosphere.

The conference was chaired by Silvia Zimmerman of the Swiss Usability Learning Center and Michele Visciola of Experientia. The impeccable organisation was in the sure hands of Cristina Lobnik.

The idea of a European UPA conference definitely took hold. The question is now who will volunteer for the UPA Europe 2009 conference. But book your calendars for 2010 when Munich, Germany will be the host city for the global UPA 2010 conference, the regional UPA Europe 2010 conference and the UPA Germany 2010 conference!

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

The publicly accessible research contains a range of predictions, but readers of Putting People First might be most interested in the future of mobile internet communications, the evolution of privacy, transparency, integrity and forgiveness, the evolution of the internet user interface, and the evolution of the internet’s impact on work and leisure.

Picking up on this last theme, John Paczkowski of Digital Daily comments:

If the line between your work and home life hasn’t yet been blurred by near-ubiquitious Internet connectivity, just you wait. Because by 2020 it’s likely to have been erased entirely. That’s the word from the Pew Internet & American Life Project whose recent “Future of the Internet III” study suggests that the dawn of the mobile phone as a “primary” Internet connection will essentially obliterate the boundaries between work and home. 56 percent of the Pew survey’s respondents agreed that by 2020 the formalized delineation of social, personal, and work time have disappeared. “The 9-to-5 approach will disappear completely, with few exceptions,” ICANN Board member Roberto Gaetano told Pew. “The current separation between ‘work time’ and ‘free time’ is a byproduct of the industrial revolution, and is bound to disappear with it.”

John sees nothing but Big Brother coming towards us.

Press release

Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research firm with a global network of consumer anthropologists, and Carton Donofrio Partners, a marketing firm in the Mid-Atlantic, today unveiled key findings from their research report, entitled, “Grounding the American Dream: A Cultural Study on the Future of Consumerism in a Changing Economy.” The study portrays a society weathering the early stages of a traumatic event, maps the changing consumer landscape, and provides insight into the transition while detailing business implications.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in October and November in New York City; Baltimore; Miami; San Antonio, Texas; and Lexington, Kentucky, the team identified a five-stage process consumers are undergoing as they struggle through a major cultural transformation. The process explains how they’re coping and rebuilding their lives amidst the faltering “American Dream.” The team then developed a business brief offering suggestions for companies in various industries working to navigate this new terrain.

- Read press release
- Download report

Service is the act of helping somebody to do something, while design is the process of making something better for somebody. Translation is the challenge of connecting strategy and implementation. Engine operates in this “translation space”, figuring out how to get to implementation from strategy.

While service design is new to designers, its not new to service providers. After all, service have been around for a long, long time (just think of hotels and restaurants), and it’s foolish to think that, with service design, designers have stumbled onto something never before seen. However, what designers do bring to the table are skills and perspectives which can help innovate services.

Read full story

“The real Achilles heel of Microsoft’s devices was their abysmal user interface - firmly wedded to the look and feel of old-fashioned computer desktops, a concept that doesn’t work on small screens.

At long last this is changing, although it is not Microsoft doing the job. Instead, phone manufacturers are busy building user-friendly interfaces to sit on the Windows platform.”

Read full story

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 often that we have appalling experiences when we use banks, buses, health services, insurance companies and other services? Why are they not designed as well as the products we love to use such as an Apple iPod or BMW car?

Reinventing mortgages
by Ben Reason and Chris Downs
Last year 110% mortgages were on offer from lenders. Today, they are likely to demand a 30% deposit. Amid the turmoil and uncertainty, one thing we can be sure of is that mortgages will never be the same again. At live|work we want to see mortgages designed to create long-term value for all parties.

Engage patients in Service Design - Don’t be afraid to ask
by Ben Reason
In his report, High Quality Care for All, Lord Darzi defines quality in service as: “clinically effective, personal and safe.” Personal is the new word that stands out. Darzi is saying that services must be orientated around individuals; services must be fit for everyone’s needs.