Philips Design research projects
NextBillion.net
AIGA Center for Brand Experience
Nathan Shedroff’s glossary of experience design
Niti Bhan on rethinking the design industry
Niti Bhan ponders in a Core77 essay how exactly designers can evolve and retool your design business, and what designers are doing once they have redefined their role.
“Bruce Nussbaum, design champion and editorial page editor at BusinessWeek observes that design studios at the forefront of this revolution are evolving their “core competencies from drawing to thinking, from styling to innovating, from shaping things to visualizing new business paradigms.” He continues by suggesting that corporations look to the design industry as a “resource to help with the broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization—creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing business practices.” [...]
The majority of those reaching out to embrace this trend have their roots in the UI industry rather than industrial design. While traditional product and graphic design practitioners enter the field with a foundation based on design history, emphasis on form, method and process, those in the UI field come from myriad backgrounds such as software engineering, marketing, and brand strategy. Without a common heritage and education, these designers are more comfortable working with disparate client groups and in interdisciplinary teams.
Furthermore, the interaction design and user experience field is such that a successful end result frequently requires an in-depth study of the client’s business strategy, marketing and corporate objectives. Thus, from the very beginning, these design professionals have been closely involved in the tangible manifestation of corporate strategy to a far greater degree than most product designers.”
Sensors and pixels everywhere
Television reloaded [Newsweek]
Television gets a mobile home [The Guardian]
A back-to-basics mobile launched [BBC]
Animal magnetism [I.D. Magazine]
A breed apart [I.D. Magazine]
A city with drive [The Independent]
Office culture [Financial Times]
This is not what social anthropologists are usually expected to ask: they observe courtship rituals, try to interpret ancient chants, analyse gift-giving or tribal cosmology.
Simon Roberts, however, is searching for meanings in the daily life of Peter Quest, a senior auditor, who works for the global accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, in a featureless tower block in central London. Quest, who has spent 32 years at the firm, manifests unease. “I call my e-mails the triffids,” he says, referring to the killer plants in John Wyndham’s 1950s novel. “You can spend all day killing them, then you turn your back for a second and those red things, those triffids, have taken over your screen again! It eats up your day. When I started my career we used to spend lots of time talking to clients and colleagues. Now it’s harder.”
Roberts is patient. “But I have noticed that people here don’t seem to classify e-mail as ‘real’ work. They sit at their desk doing e- mails and then say, ‘Right, now let’s do some work’ – but e-mail is taking up work time. Perhaps that is the problem?”
Seoul machine [Wired Magazine]
Such predictions came from a study conducted by the National Science & Technology Council. The council announced a total of 761 technological tasks in eight areas, namely aerospace, materials and production, information and knowledge, food and biological resources, life and health, energy and environment, security, and territory management and social infrastructure.
