Great design is characterised by deep user understanding, visualisation of creative resolution of tensions, collaborative prototyping to enhance solutions, and continuous modification and enhancement after launch. The result is design solutions that are easy for users to adopt, delightful for them to use, and likely to get better over time.

Corporate decisions, in contrast, are likely to be driven more by producer desires than user needs, accepting of unpleasant trade-offs generated without intensive involvement of users, and applied inflexibly. As a result, decisions tend to take a long time to make, often unravel, take expensive and time-consuming “buy-in” procedures, and are lower quality than they could be with greater user understanding and input.

[By Roger L. Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management]

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Related:
- Indian call centres to swell with foreigners soon – [Hindustan Times, 6 June 2005]
- 120,000 foreigners needed to plug India’s skills gap – [Silicon.com, 3 June 2005]

The Commission proposes an 80% increase in funding for ICT research focused on areas where Europe has recognised strengths: nano-electronics, embedded systems, communications, and ‘emerging areas such as web-services and cognitive systems’.

Now you probably knew, but I did not, that Europe is a leader in cognitive systems. To be frank, I had no idea what they are, or do. So I checked them out.

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The Itracks survey also found that many teenagers are abusing their mobile phone privileges. More than one-third (38%) of teens surveyed use their mobile phones to text-message their friends during school, 30% play video games on their phones while in school, and more than one-quarter (26%) use their phones to talk to people their parents would not approve of. The survey also revealed that on average, teens spend almost as much time on their mobile phones as they spend doing physical activity.

According to the survey, teens are very attached to their mobile phones. Fully one half of those surveyed said they would rather have their TV privileges restricted than their mobile phone use, while more than a quarter (27%) indicated they would prefer to have Web access or use of iPods limited rather than have their mobile phones taken away”.

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(via textually.org)

QRCA brings together nearly 1000 qualitative research consultants throughout the world. They include focus group moderators, facilitators, interviewers and planners with expertise in focus groups, individual depth interviews (IDIs), ethnography, observational research, usability research, idea generation, and other qualitative approaches in-person and online.

(via Customer Experience Crossroads)

Ambidextrous is a forum for the cross-disciplinary, cross-market community of people with an academic, professional and personal interest in design. The magazine is geared toward high subscriber participation and interaction. It is expressly designed to be informal, irreverent, and fun to read.

Go to website

(via CPH127)

The 300+ entries satisfied juror John Thackara that the answer is yes.

On 21 September, a meeting will be held for city and regional policymakers to discuss whether the ideas raised in Fused Space might be used in real-world planning and development.

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With an estimated 80 percent of adults between 18 and 65 owning a cell phone, the potential for growth in the cell phone market is slowing. By contrast, only 10 percent of preteens have a cell phone, leading industry observers to see them as perhaps the final frontier for cell phone manufacturers and carriers.

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Romeo has been taken with the idea of blobjects ever since he heard technology guru Bruce Sterling discuss them in a speech.

Each Blobject car comes with a touch-screen computer system, based on open-source software, mounted in the dash. Through a USB port, you can plug in a flash drive containing information on Cordoba in Spanish, English or French.

By using GPS technology, the computer keeps track of exactly where you are in the city. When you pass a certain landmark, the computer then knows to display the appropriate text, audio and video information about that landmark on the screen.

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(via Communication Nation)

With the new technology, a grandmother in rural area can receive money from her son, working hundreds of miles away, with the beep of her cellphone. A teenager can buy groceries with a few punches of keys. Not a coin need change hands.

It’s a high-tech solution designed to help poor people here who never have had access to banks, cash machines, or credit cards. And it’s another example of using digital technology to fast forward development in remote areas.

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(via textually.org)

It offers business a single point of access to the world’s leading future-thinkers, and develops the knowledge-bases and methodologies to enable business to adopt future-thinking as an integral part of their strategic planning process.

The 2005 conference takes place from 21 to 23 September in Saint-Paul de Vence, France. Several sessions focus on the importance of understanding people.

The conference homepage links to a number of interesting publications on branding and foresight.

Awash in information, patients face a lonely, uncertain road (14 August 2005 – Permanent link)
A generation ago, patients argued for more information, more choice and more say about treatment. To a great extent, that is exactly what they have received: a superabundance of information, often several treatment options and the right to choose among them.
As this new responsibility dawns on patients, some embrace it with a sense of pride and furious determination. But many find the job of being a modern patient, with its slog through medical uncertainty, to be lonely, frightening and overwhelming.

Patients turn to advocates, support groups and e-mail, too (14 August 2005)
Battle-hardened by the medical system, patients have become pretty good at taking care of one another. If they are not learning enough from their doctors about diagnoses and treatment options, they can turn to organisations that offer support and education programs for specific illnesses. Doctors can often make recommendations about which of these groups are reliable.

In the hospital, a degrading shift from person to patient (16 August 2005 – Permanent link)
Entering the medical system, whether a hospital, a nursing home or a clinic, is often degrading. In interviews and surveys, people who have recently received medical care say that even when they benefit from the expertise of first-rate doctors, they often feel resentful, helpless and dehumanised in the process.
“The point is that when they talk about quality of health care, patients mean something entirely different than experts do,” said Dr. Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Foundation. “They’re not talking about numbers or outcomes but about their own human experience, which is a combination of cost, paperwork and what I’ll call the hassle factor, the impersonal nature of the care.”

Essential but uncommon knowledge: Patients have many rights. Just ask. (16 August 2005)
You can refuse treatment. You can almost always leave when you are ready to. You can demand to know the name of anyone who enters your room. You may be able to have better food – and even wine – brought in from outside. In many cases, you can ditch the hospital gown and wear your own clothes.

Sick and scared, and waiting, waiting, waiting (20 August 2005 – Permanent link)
Waiting has long been part of medicine. Patients like Ms. Odlum wait for test results; others spend weeks or months waiting for appointments or stranded for hours in doctors’ waiting rooms. But health care researchers say the waiting problem has only gotten worse. Advances in technology have created more tests and procedures to wait for, and new drugs and treatments mean more people need more doctor visits.

Alone in Illness, Seeking Steady Arm to Lean On (26 August 2005 – Permanent link)
There is no way to calculate how many Americans of all ages living alone happen to be sick or disabled, but hospital discharge planners and home health care agencies say they are serving more single people without an obvious person to look after them.

Where to Get Help in Planning for Illness (26 August 2005)
To be ill and alone requires far more advanced planning than is required of those who live with their families. It is a predicament poorly understood by health care providers, who are likely to advise hiring a home health aid or other professional.

Related: IDEO’s design cure – [Metropolis, October 2002] (pdf, 828 kb)

These are not true bottom-up, spontaneous, grass-roots expressions of networked solidarity, nor even representations of groups willing to follow up on their stated convictions; they are simply instances of large numbers of people momentarily willing to take their orders from above.

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(via MobileActive)

Five threats are identified in a report from a powerful European consortium: Surveillance of users; spamming; identity theft; malicious attacks (on AmI systems); and a cultural condition they describe as ‘digital divide’.

The research consortium – whose members include the Fraunhofer Institute, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – has been asked to investigate ‘Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence’ (hence its embarrassing acronym, SWAMI).

In a 200+ page interim report, the team reviews the state of the art in AmI. Their initial conclusion is that ‘ambient intelligence technology violates most of currently existing privacy-protecting borders’.

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The Italian-language interview (Régine also lives in Turin, Italy) can be listened to as mp3 and as podcast.

For more information

The result of the interview — in Italian — can be listened to as mp3 and as a podcast.

For more information

The gadget, which contains an actual ink pen, can “see” what you write, read it out loud, and respond to written commands. At the heart of these capabilities lies a tiny camera, which is embedded near Fly’s writing tip, and special Fly paper, which must be used with the device. The dots printed on this paper and invisible to the eye tell the pen’s camera exactly where it’s positioned on the paper, so as it moves, the pen “sees” exactly what you write.

The device, aimed at 9- to 14-year-olds, is likely to be a hit. Kids can use it as a calculator, keep a calendar, create and record music, and play complex logic and geography games.

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The 17-person company, founded in 1995, works with only one client at a time. It charges $500,000 per project, and the entire firm spends 10 weeks on each assignment. And while the firm’s goal is to devise breakthrough ideas, Brighthouse CEO Joey Reiman insists on following a rigorous four-step process for achieving that goal.

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From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent’s richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth.

Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period.

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Related: Guardian story (14 September 2005)