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Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we’re now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.
Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as “Web 1.0.” According to this transcript, Berners-Lee was reacting to an IBM developerWorks pod cast interviewer who’d categorized Web 1.0 as connected computers and making information available, and Web 2.0 as connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Those who remember the empowering effects of Netscape and the moment email became more than just borrowing your mate’s CompuServe account at work will also recognize such blanket assertions of historical revisionism for what they are. |
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31 August 2006
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21 August 2006
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How can we put the user of public eServices in the center of the designing and delivery of online public services and content?
The EU’s eUSER project wants to stimulate the availability and usage of useful and easy to use online public services. The focus will be on the needs of citizens as users of online public services in their interactions with public administrations in general, in the management of their health and in furthering their education and developing their skills. The project will prepare a state-of-the-art resource base on user needs in relation to online public services and on user-oriented methods for meeting these needs. It will then use this resource base to actively support the IST programme, projects, EU policy and the wider European Research Community to better address user needs in the design and delivery of online public services. The project website already provides some very interesting statistics, country briefs and reports. Incidentally, the project is run in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada. Read also this feature article, entitled “What users really want from online public services”, published on the IST Results website. |
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19 August 2006
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With its “Pictures of the Future” approach, Siemens takes a long look into the future: 10, 20 or even 30 years, depending upon the area of activity. The goal is “to identify promising technologies and future consumer wishes and to discover new business possibilities”. The result of Siemens’ methodical approach to strategic planning is “a coherent vision of tomorrow’s world”.
Here are some of the the important future trends that Siemens identified:
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18 August 2006
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The news that Microsoft might open a major research centre in Turin, Italy (”Torino” in Italian) is obviously very important for the city and region where I live. Since the story is not yet available in English, here the translation from the La Stampa newspaper, which launched the news a few days ago.
Go Turin! |
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18 August 2006
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Experientia, the international experience design consultancy, launches today two new thematic blogs:
E-Democracy is aimed at public authorities. It gathers information on citizen participation and the use of web 2.0 technologies in the websites of public authorities, public administrations and local governments. Although it has some overlap with Putting People First, it has a lot of original material and I will maintain it regularly. Playful & Tangible is about playful learning with new interfaces, particulary in museums and entertainment environments. It documents many inspirations and examples of playful and tangible interactions and interfaces, and has a strong interaction design focus. Initially developed as an internal working blog to document some interesting museum and entertainment interfaces, we decided to make the blog public. As an internal blog, it quotes richly from other sources and we are very grateful to our main inspirations: Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art, Chris O’Shea of Pixelsumo and Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture. We have added the original source links throughout the blog. The blog is currently maintained by Mark Vanderbeeken of the Italy-based experience design company Experientia, though most of the content was selected by Héctor Ouilhet and Alexander Wiethoff, who worked as Experientia interns during the summer of 2006. Each blog has about 50 posts at the moment. |
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16 August 2006
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The latest issue of the Arts Management newsletter is devoted to the creative industries, with a specific global angle (America, Asia, Australia and Europe).
Table of contents:
Download newsletter (pdf, 244 kb, 11 pages) |
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16 August 2006
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It’s been 12 years since the U.S. government went online, writes Robert D. Atkinson in Public CIO Magazine. The first stage of e-government meant a passive presence on the Web based on information, but not citizen interaction. The public sector evolved to the second stage: developing web applications that allowed individuals to interact with government, such as paying parking tickets and renewing drivers’ licenses.
But most governments have been slow to move to the third stage of e-government — creating functionally oriented, citizen-centered Web presences by breaking down bureaucratic barriers. Too often, existing e-government applications are user-unfriendly, designed around agencies’ needs rather than citizens’. Some in government have pushed hard to get to stage three, but all too often, they’ve faced stiff resistance. By their very nature, governments have a hard time building applications that link together multiple agencies and programs, and an even harder time linking applications that cut across levels of government. Few agencies see their job as helping users solve problems or access information, including information from other related agencies, other levels of government and even private-sector players. Rather, the default attitude is to present only their agency’s information and applications. As a result, it doesn’t appear that governments acting alone will any time soon make the kinds of fundamental changes needed to bring about true citizen-centered e-government. Government and the private sector have already engaged in successful partnerships in numerous areas. One of the most widely used is tax preparation and filing. […] It’s time to build on this model by empowering for-profit and nonprofit organizations to help citizens and businesses interact electronically with government, particularly in areas that are inherently complex or involve cross-agency and cross-government functions. To do this, governments must think of themselves less as direct providers of e-government services and more as enablers of third-party integrators that tie together multiple agencies across multiple levels of government to package information, forms, regulations, and other government services and requirements in user-friendly ways. Moving to this model has the potential to dramatically boost the uptake of digital government services, cut costs for both government and users, and make the experience of dealing with government less frustrating. Intermediaries can play a key role in two kinds of tasks: building and operating function-based portals, and creating digital integration tools. |
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16 August 2006
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Africa, in particular Nigeria, is dominating international mobile phone access to the BBC’s website.
According to July’s statistics, 61% of the BBC’s international Wap users came from Nigeria and 19% from South Africa. Africa is the world’s largest-growing mobile phone market with unreliable landlines encouraging the growth. Mobile phone providers in many African countries have only recently begun rolling out Wap-enabled handsets. And the large take up of BBC news via mobiles in Nigeria contrasts starkly with the relatively small number of users accessing the internet via pcs - hampered by slow and unreliable landlines. |
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16 August 2006
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Elaborating on a recent Associated Press story that I blogged about, I found an interesting reflection on ‘digital natives’ changing corporate office culture by Anne Kirah, Microsoft’s senior design anthropologist:
“Kirah considers herself to be among the category which many of us older users fall into: the ‘digital immigrant’. This term defines those who have adapted to use technology, but were not born to it as digital natives were. We think we understand it, and perhaps many of us do, but learning to understand something and intuitively comprehending it are not the same qualities.” “According to Kirah, digital natives are always online, even if they aren’t actually doing anything on the web. They are constantly involved with the internet or a PC when it comes to multitasking in their daily life.” “One has to accept that this generation is wired differently and have personal and work ethics which contrast sharply with previous generations. Now, those values are being brought into the office as digital natives begin to enter the work force, and that is causing some issues.” “‘These digital natives are now in the workforce. It’s a paradigm shift in how companies operate because, what do these companies do? They block the internet. They don’t allow instant messaging. They don’t allow all these behaviours which these kids have grown up with. Digital natives say, ‘Give me a deadline and I’ll get the work done. If I want to do it at 2 AM, that’s my business, but don’t tell me how and when”, says Kirah.” In another article, this time published by the British entertainment website Monsters and Critics, Kirah shares her insights on news organisations: “News companies must adapt to the new world. The way they can survive is if the reporters read the viewers constantly and give them what they want, by bringing in citizen video and stories. They must listen to the story unfolding and use all reasonable resources of the viewers. But they must give something back to build loyalty, and that’s authenticity. Not stories filtered through company or political bias, but real news.” |
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16 August 2006
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The Serious Games Initiative is focused “on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.”
The website, which is really a blog, was developed by David Rejeski, director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consultancy. On the Wilson Centre website — which strangely enough doesn’t provide a link back to the Serious Games Initiative website — you can read an interesting article by David Rejeski where he argues that there should be a public sector body to make video games in the same way that PBS or the BBC makes radio and television. This body, which Rejeski calls “Corporation for Public Gaming”, “would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good.” In other words its goal would be “to provide high-quality games, which ‘inform, enlighten and enrich the public.” Sawyer was also the volunteer producer of the first Serious Games Summit held at the 2004 Game Developers’ Conference. The 2006 Serious Games Summit is “the premier professional conference for the creators and commissioners of serious games, [focused on] the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors”. The Summit is organised by Jamil Moledina of the tech marketing company CMP. Moledina and CMP are also in charge of the Game Developers’ Conference. (via my business partner Jan-Christoph Zoels and Anne Galloway of Ottawa’s Carleton University) |
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14 August 2006
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In a reflective article written as a follow-up to the Participatory Design conference held a few weeks ago in Trento, Italy, Ann Light dissects the difference between participatory design (PD) and user-centred design (UCD).
“What is the status of the ‘users’ you are working with?” she asks. “Are they treated as providing inspiration for design or are they treated as co-designers?” Citing Patrizia Marti of the Communication Science Department at the University of Siena, Italy, Light writes that with the ‘user-centred inspiration’ approach “there is no accountability to the people who are the source of this material, or return to them for further engagement.” According to Marti, “the origins of PD are deeply intertwined with trade unions’ efforts to bring democracy into work domains. So there is a political energy in the philosophy of PD about engaging people in the designs that affect them. This desire to democratise is not apparent in much current UCD work. […] She pointed out that end-users are still often considered as Human Factors rather than Human Actors.” |
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14 August 2006
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Yesterday, the New York Times published an intriguing story on companies embarking on qualitative market research. The article lists examples of the hedge fund Second Curve Capital visiting and interacting as customers with bank branches, the faucet-and-fixtures manufacturer Moen Inc. filming people taking real showers in their own homes and using the findings to design a new line of products, and QuickBase, a division of Intuit, trying to make sense of customer behaviour that never fails to surprise them.
“Second Curve Capital is a hedge fund that manages hundreds of millions of dollars by making big, long-term bets on the stocks of banks and financial services companies. That means [the company] spends much of [its] time hobnobbing with chief executives and bantering with chief financial officers — the rarefied world of big-time investors hunting for their next great buy-or-sell decision.” “Once a year, though, [Second Curve] organizes a different kind of hunt — a “branch hunt.” In it, the entire organization turns its attention from the suite to the street — and, by scrutinizing the fine details of how banks interact with their customers, sees the market from a new perspective.” “In some cases, getting out of your office means, well, getting into someone else’s shower. A few years back, Continuum, an industrial design and innovation consulting firm in West Newton, Mass., worked with Moen Inc., the faucet-and-fixtures manufacturer, to develop a new line of showerheads for the home.” “Continuum has a reputation for unconventional research techniques, and it suggested that the best way to understand what consumers would value in a shower was not just to listen to them, through focus groups or surveys, but to watch them as well. That is, to film them taking real showers in their own homes and use the findings to design a new line of products.” “This up-close-and-personal technique generated all sorts of revealing insights. Researchers saw that people spent half their time in the shower with their eyes closed, that they spent 30 percent of their time avoiding water and that, because of poor shower design, they often risked slipping or otherwise being hurt.” “These and other findings shaped the design of Moen’s Revolution showerhead, which became a best seller.” Read full story (permanent link) |
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14 August 2006
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Today Microsoft is expected to announce the fall release of a product called XNA Game Studio Express, a basic version of the company’s game authoring tools that will let aspiring designers write games on a PC and test them on an ordinary Xbox 360.
For Microsoft, the goal is to inspire amateurs to share or sell relatively simple games on the company’s Xbox Live network. (Microsoft will not own any rights to products created with these tools.) Programs created with XNA Game Studio Express will not look as good as most packaged titles. But at a time when gamers seem tired of sequels and genre standards, the company says it believes that some kind of independent games business could provide a breath of fresh air. “We thought a lot about ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ” said Scott Henson, a director for Microsoft’s game developer group, referring to the low-budget horror film that became a surprise hit in 1999. And, of course, the company hopes the process of making games proves as addictive as playing them. “On the Internet, we’re going from a monologue world to a dialogue world,” Mr. Henson said, referring to sites with user-created content like MySpace and YouTube. “It’s amazing how much participation there is.” - Read full story (permanent link) |
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13 August 2006
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“To Jaron Lanier, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ delivers a reflection of the lowest common denominator”, writes Steven Levy in his Newsweek column.
“Jaron Lanier [has become the] dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of digital collectivism, an ethic that celebrates and exploits the ability of the Web to aggregate the preferences and behaviors of millions of people.” “In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). “To Lanier, these represent an alarming decision—rejecting individual expression and creativity to become part of a faceless mob. To emphasize the enormity of this movement, Lanier titled his essay with a fearsome moniker: ‘Digital Maoism’.” “The result, says Lanier, is often a mundane reflection of the lowest common denominator, an inevitable consequence of the “stupid and boring” hive mind. Not surprisingly, the targets of his criticism are crying foul.” |
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11 August 2006
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More than half of the UK’s 16-24 year olds are using social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo at least once a week, as the “networked generation” turns its back on television, radio and newspapers in favour of online communities.
More than 70 per cent of 16-24 year olds polled by Ofcom told the UK communications regulator they visited such sites, and 54 per cent used them at least weekly. Only about 12 per cent of internet users aged 35 or over used such sites weekly. The findings underscore a rapid divergence between young consumers’ media habits and those of older generations, which could have worrying implications for traditional media companies. - Read full article |
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9 August 2006
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Engagement and co-production will grow only out of a deeper, richer understanding of how services relate in practice to people’s everyday lives.
Drawing on the principles and practices of the emerging discipline of ‘service design’, this pamphlet (book, really) by Demos, the UK ‘everyday democracy’ think tank, argues that the common challenge which all service organisations face is how to create more intimate and responsive relationships with their users and customers. Drawing on over 50 interviews with service innovators from the public, private and voluntary sectors The Journey to the Interface makes the case for a fresh approach to public service reform – an approach that is less about competition and contestability, and more about closing the gap between what people want and need, and what service organisations do. From cleaning the streets to checkouts, from looking after our elderly parents to selling us holidays, more than 20 million people in the UK work in the service sector. The so-called ‘service economy’ now makes up 72% of our GDP. And while most of us work in service; all of us depend on it for many aspects of our existence. The giving and receiving of service has become an unmistakable part of everyday life. But this expansion of the service sector has not heralded a service revolution. Too often people’s day to day experiences are alienating and frustrating. The pamphlet argues that service design can offer policy makers and practitioners a vision for the transformation of public services, as well as a route to get there. It outlines an agenda for action which spells out how service design approaches can be applied systemically. - Download pamphlet (pdf, 2.8 mb, 118 pages) (via Usability News) |
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9 August 2006
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Households in Britain can be classified into 23 “e-types” depending on their access to technology, say University College London researchers, as reported by the BBC.
E-types include mobile explorers, the e-committed and rational utilitarians. The 23 e-types are organised in eight overarching groups: the E-Ungaged, E-Marginalised, the Becoming Engaged, the E for Entertainment and Shopping, the E-Independents, the Instrumental E-Users, the E-Business Users and the E-Experts. The researchers say the profiles could be used to inform future policies on access to digital technology. Every postcode in Britain has been assigned a classification which people can check online to see if they agree with the researcher’s analysis. “What really emerges is that almost all of the types have some interaction with technology,” said Professor Paul Longley, who led the study at UCL. “In a sense we are all digital now”. The research, part of the Spatial Literacy initiative between UCL, Leicester and Nottingham Universities, aimed to build a comprehensive picture of access to digital technology in Britain. - View 23 e-types |
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9 August 2006
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Vodafone has just published the 16th issue of Receiver, its online magazine on the future of communications technologies.
The current edition is all about about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music. “How can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together?” The eight articles deal with social coordination in urban environments, “big games”, social planning, and much more. |
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9 August 2006
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Harvard Business School professor Carliss Baldwin and her colleagues Christoph Hienerth and Eric von Hippel were drawn to the sport of rodeo kayaking, but not to get their feet wet. Instead, they realised that both the sport and industry of rodeo kayaking was a wonderful example of how “user innovations” evolve and eventually become commercial products. Hienerth is a professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, while von Hippel is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.
User innovations occur when customers of a product improve on that product with their own designs. In rodeo kayaking, the early participants built specialized kayaks from fiberglass using hand lay-up techniques; these crafts were especially nimble in rough water. In the early 1970s, other kayakers began asking these “user innovators” to create equipment for them—and the rodeo kayaking industry was born. Since then, rodeo kayaks have gone through several major design iterations, and the sport has become a $100 million business. Baldwin and her fellow researchers wanted to better understand this path from user innovation to commercial product. What role do user communities play in this process? Are “user-manufacturers” —users who turn their improvements into commercial products—usually industry leaders? How competitive are existing, well-capitalized companies when they compete against user-manufacturers? Although there have been a number of studies on user innovation, little if any work has been done on the commercialization of user innovations, the authors believe. The research was recently published in the working paper How User Innovations Become Commercial Products: A Theoretical Investigation and Case Study (pdf, 2.98 mb, 29 pages). The authors believe that their research “provides a first opportunity for both user-manufacturers and established manufacturers to think systematically about the dynamics of these types of markets, and to plan their business strategies accordingly.” In an interview in Harvard Busines School’s Working Knowledge, Baldwin discusses the research and its implications for entrepreneurs who would like to become their own user innovators. (via IdeaPort) |
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8 August 2006
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“PlayWorks” is the title of a new permanent exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan aimed at children under 5.
“Beneath each image will be a second canvas, a textural and three-dimensional rendering, which a child can touch. And this installation will be just one in a series of interactive exhibits: a huge transparent wall whose surface is for fingerpainting; a climbing structure with hidden dioramas; a sand laboratory with buried “treasures”; a construction area for building gadgets; and, among many other displays, a mechanical baby dragon that will say words when children drop letters into its mouth. The exhibition’s emphasis is not the old saw that learning is fun, but that fun is learning.” “The idea is that in moments of everyday play children are really getting a tremendous amount of education,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an adviser to the project. “The significance of play as a foundation for learning is a critically important cultural message.” Read full story (permanent link) |