From the press release:

“Philips Design will have a space on Second Life where virtual concepts can be tested and residents can participate in co-design projects. In this way, Second Life users can have a greater say in the kind of colors, ergonomics, functionality and other features of products they may wish to buy in this virtual world. This will allow Philips Design to find new ways of relating to end users. Having such direct feedback can significantly enrich the design process and lead to innovative and surprising end results. This fits with the Philips Design philosophy that design should be based around people and grounded in research. It also corresponds to Philips Design’s firm belief that the future of design lies in the co-creation of products.”

Philips Design has just signed a collaboration agreement with Rivers Run Read, the leading virtual world design agency in Europe, to establish a Philips Design presence within Second Life conceived as “a collaborative working space for the real and virtual worlds”.

Read full press release

The survey, which took six months to complete, included data from more than 4,000 cell phone and smart phone subscribers from China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Results were broken out by country, carrier, platform and device.

The full results of the study, “Mobile Device ARPU for Leading Markets: U.S., U.K., Germany, India, and China, A Multiclient Study,” is scheduled to be released during the 2007 International Consumer Electronic Show in January.

- Read full story
- Read IDC press release

The organisers “believe in people-driven innovation, enabling [their] students to understand innovation from the point of view of everyday people. Accepting this fact, 180°academy turns the traditional approach to innovation [which is technology-driven] around.”

The academy combines “theory with practice in a cross-disciplinary programme allowing students to understand the innovation process as a whole” and covers “topics as diverse as ethnography, competitive analysis, ideation, prototyping, branding, business plans and patenting, to name a few.”

The objective is “to educate top talent in large and small companies worldwide to innovate holistically – internally within their organisation’s different departments and externally by meeting the needs and aspirations of the people they are innovating for.”

The 180º Academy offers three part-time programmes which are designed for working individuals: the flagship nine-module Master Practitioner Programme, the three-module Executive Programme for executives, and a smaller six-module Insight Programme for mid-sized and small companies.

The acting dean is Anne Kirah, former senior design anthropologist at Microsoft (see my recent interview with her). Other professors are Richard Pascale (associate fellow, Oxford University) and Lars Thøger Christensen (professor, Department of Marketing, University of Southern Denmark). The faculty also includes the following visiting professors, consultants and associate professors: Teng-Kee Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Kirsten Becker (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Uday Dandavate (SonicRim, USA), Simona Maschi (Milan Polytechnic and former associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea), Heather Martin (also former associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and Pia Betton (Framework Identity, Berlin).

“Today an anthropologist at [Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center], Brinda Dalal, has become a self-styled ‘garbologist’ to assist in a joint effort with chemists at the Xerox Research Center of Canada to develop an ‘erasable paper’ system. The goal is to recycle paper documents produced by the company’s copiers — potentially an unlimited number of times.”

What she has discovered is a notable change in the role of paper in modern offices, where it is increasingly used as a medium of display rather than storage. Documents are stored on central servers and personal computers and printed only as needed; for meetings, editing or reviewing information.”

“The pieces of paper spewed from copiers frequently end up back in the recycling bin on the same day they are printed, she noted.”

“Of the 1,200 pages the average office worker prints per month, 44.5 percent are for daily use — assignments, drafts or e-mail. In her research, scouring the waste produced by office workers, she found that 21 percent of black-and-white copier documents were returned to the recycling bin on the same day they were produced.”

“Her research is part of a three-year-old technology development effort to design an add-on system for an office copier to produce ‘transient documents’ that can be easily reused. […] The printed information on the document ‘disappears’ within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply placing them in the copier paper tray. The researchers said that individual pieces of paper had been printed on up to 50 times, and the only current limit in the process appears to be paper life.”

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“Unfortunately,” he says, it “suffers from some very serious flaws,” and he hopes “that all readers will bring an especially critical eye to it.”

In his review, he focuses on a few things in particular that bother him about the book and Moggridge’s approach to the material.

“First, he overuses (and misuses) the interview format, without providing authenticating evidence for the stories told by his subjects. Long stretches of the book feel like little more than mindless design-star fan journalism about the authors pals and their companies.”

“Finally, Moggridge never misses an opportunity to use his own company, IDEO, in a case study, or one of its employees in an interview. But by failing to make that vested interest clear, Moggridge turns the book into a marketing project. Bruce Sterling’s jacket blurb describes Designing Interactions as “a labor of love.” In this case, love is, if not blind, than pretty nearsighted. The book really should at the very least have the word “IDEO” in its title.”

Read full review

“Yet Apple has scored a succession of design coups: from introducing color to computers with the first iMac in 1998, to launching the iPod as an icon of the early 2000s. It has also proved repeatedly, as Olivetti did with office equipment and Braun with electrical appliances during the 1960s, that people are willing to pay more for an object, if it is so well designed that they really, really want it.”

“That said, no company rests on its design laurels for long. Who would cite Olivetti or Braun as role models of design today? And Apple is entering a challenging time. If the blogs are right, it is finalizing plans to go into the cellphone market early next year with the iPhone. And having striven to establish its design supremacy in aesthetics and usability, Apple now needs to do so in sustainability to ward off attacks from environmental groups.”

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“Participatory media is changing the way we communicate, engage with media and each other and even our approaches to teaching and learning.”

“The generation of digital natives - those that have grown up immersed in digital media - take all of this for granted. There is nothing strange, new or even transformative about the interactive, participative landscape of blogging, social networking and Web 2.0 Read/Write media for them. This is the very starting point, the background canvas on which they live their lives.”

“The promise of participatory media is a democratic media, and a media that strengthens our democratic rights in concrete terms. Howard Rheingold has written extensively about the very real uses people have put mobile and digital media to in fighting street level battles over concrete issues. In his 2002 bestseller Smart Mobs, he writes about the ways that these technologies have been put to use in online collaboration, direct political action and the lives of young people across the planet.”

“But can the use of these emergent socially networked technologies transcend entertainment and personal expression, and push us forward towards an engaged, empowered democracy?”

In his recent lecture The Pedagogy of Civic Participation, which took place in the 3D virtual world Second Life on the NMC Campus, Howard Rheingold asks this very question.

In this special feature, which was published on the blog of Rome, Italy-based Robin Good, Good has divided Howard Rheingold’s presentation into several audio files, and brought together the key points and questions discussed. You can listen to the original verbal presentation delivered for each key point or browse through the summary notes he has posted next to each.

Rheingold’s lecture was part of the MacArthur Foundation’s series on Digital Media and Learning, a ”five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialise and participate in civic life.”

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“Our focus,” argues Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies programme, “should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition.”

“These properties cut across different media platforms and different cultural communities: they suggest something of the way we live in relation to media today. Understanding the nature of our relationship with media is central to any attempt to develop a curriculum that might foster the skills and competencies needed to engage within participatory culture.”

Jenkins’ article, which was published on the blog of Rome, Italy-based Robin Good, contains eight sections, each entitled with an adjective (innovative, convergent, everyday, appropriative, networked, global, generational and unequal) that together, according to him, describe the contemporary media landscape.

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- Read full story (versione italiana)

(via Usernomics | Usability in the News)

“IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IA’s didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on.”

“The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.”

“Either you believe meaning is inherent in the natural structure of the universe, or you believe that meaning is relative, personal, and different for everyone.”

“The biggest cleavage along these lines, as Shirky alluded to, is Google Search (meaning is relative and can be modeled by links) vs. Yahoo Directory (meaning is inherent in the structure of information). We all know who won that battle. Yahoo has all but demonstrated that the directory model, and not the folksonomy model, doesn’t scale.”

- Read full story
- Read more on this debate

(via Usernomics | Usability in the News)

“Cities have long competed over job growth, struggling to revive their downtowns and improve their image. But the latest population trends have forced them to fight for college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds, a demographic group increasingly viewed as the key to an economic future.”

“Mobile but not flighty, fresh but technologically savvy, ‘the young and restless’, as demographers call them, are at their most desirable age, particularly because their chances of relocating drop precipitously when they turn 35. Cities that do not attract them now will be hurting in a decade.”

“The problem for cities, says Richard Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University who has written about what he calls ‘the creative class’, is that those cities that already have a significant share of the young and restless are in the best position to attract more.”

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“Yet, there is a nagging question — if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?”

“We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people’s intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?”

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(via Howard Rheingold)

The site contains a long list of pdf articles, including one on user-centred research and its impact upon the healing environment.

“Within the healthcare landscape, user-centred research is one way for the designer to understand and develop an empathy for the needs of the patient, caregiver (medical and hospital staff) and care partner (family/other).”

“Through user-centred research design professionals methodically capture the patient journey, as well as the experiences of those that visit and work in healthcare environments. By documenting these experiences, opportunities for improvement and innovation are revealed. User-centred research is built upon a foundation of evidence proven through observation, interviewing, listening, and assumption-testing techniques, and then categorising the research as interactions between the people, spaces, tasks, information and objects. On the people side, it’s important to understand the behaviour and communication that occurs between itinerant nurses and the patients they serve, or the personal conversations in public spaces between doctor and concerned care partners. We evaluate the ambient environment of healthcare spaces observing the interplay of light, color, texture, sound and aroma, as well as LEED’s impact thereon. We delve into “tasking” in healthcare spaces, that may range from filling out patient paperwork to repetitive maintenance activities.”

Download article (pdf, 268 kb, 4 pages)

Gardien stresses the importance of meaning in technological innovation: “design must start with observing and understanding people”.

Philips uses an innovation model called “the alchemy of growth”, which is based on three horizons: extending and defending the core business; building emerging/new businesses; and create viable longer-term options. “As a company, you need to be able to manage these three horizons simultaneously”.

Gardien then cites an interesting example of this approach: the Nebula design project that aimed at figuring out “whether we can make the waking-up experience more pleasant”, which was then turned into an ambient experience in MRI scan rooms for children (pictured).

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After all, “the more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel.”

He then goes on to describe how this choice could be brought down to a more reasonable number, like one.

He has a point. “This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for “Making Everybody Happy,” but it’s based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.”

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(via Usernomics/Usability in the News)

UPDATE 1

And here is an article by Moishe Lettvin, a member of the “Windows Mobile PC User Experience” team, explaining why this actually happened. According to Joel Spolsky, this shows that Microsoft “has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum and overstaffing. […] Somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991 - 2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product.”

UPDATE 2

Arno Gourdol, a software experience designer at Adobe and a former Lead of the Mac OS X Finder feature, describes the very different way that the same shutdown feature was designed in Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.

Not everyone is comfortable with Google’s growing power. “Google has this imperial digital ambition that frightens me,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit focused on maintaining media diversity and openness. […]

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said he is concerned that Google 2.0 could represent the first glimpse of a future dominated by a handful of giant companies whose control over vast computer networks lets them broker both digital advertising and access to digital content, possibly controlling what information and which ads users can easily locate online. […]

“What I believe is threatening to people in many fields is that we will lose the independent distribution model of the Web,” said Kahle. “That would be a horrible waste of 20 years of promising developments.” […]

For some critics, the most worrisome aspect of Google’s transformation is how it has begun to use the copious personal data it collects from users to deliver personally customized responses.

The old Google did not target advertisements to individuals. Instead it analyzed words typed into its search box to determine what ads might be most relevant.

The new Google tracks individuals who are logged into their Google accounts, noting, for example, which search results draw their attention and which ads receive their clicks.

Google accounts are required to use Google’s free online productivity applications, including Gmail, the Google calendar, Google docs and the Google notebook, as well as other services.

Chester said consumers are not prepared to deal with the kind of sophisticated data collecting and data mining that has become routine for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as for smaller Internet companies. Earlier this month, the Center for Digital Democracy filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, requesting an investigation into online marketing and data collection practices.

The Mercury News wrote about the data collection practices of Internet giants in a special report published in August that found the companies’ privacy policies did not protect personal data from disclosure under certain circumstances.

“I don’t think one can trust Google, and I think the direction that Google is going in should send civil-liberty chills and privacy chills throughout the user community,” Chester said. “Google 2.0 is simply a 21st-century version of one of the media giants.”

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“With 35 million elderly people in America, “the old, old” — those over 85 — are now considered the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. While medical advances have enabled an unprecedented number of Americans to live longer and healthier lives, this new longevity has also had unintended consequences. For millions of Americans, living longer also means serious chronic illness and a protracted physical decline that can require an immense amount of care, often for years and sometimes even decades. Yet just as the need for care is rising, the number of available caregivers is dwindling. With families more dispersed than ever and an overburdened healthcare system, many experts fear that we are on the threshold of a major crisis in care.”

Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, producers of the American investigative TV programme Frontline, investigated the crisis and explored the new realities of aging in America in the 60-minute feature “Living Old”, which aired yesterday evening on PBS (the public broadcaster in the US).

The full programme can be viewed online in Quicktime and Windows Media. The website also contains extended interviews; profiles of the featured individuals and families; an interactive map featuring the demographics of America’s elderly, and the comparative costs of nursing homes, assisted living and home care; facts and stats; special readings; and information where to go for further help.

Frontline’s Living Old website

Read also this interesting reflection by Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times. An excerpt: “What’s distinctive about old age now, and what makes the lives of the so-called old old interesting, is what this generation of 80- and 90-somethings and centurions brings to it. To that end I wish someone had asked the people in this program about Europe, Ellis Island, cars, the Roaring Twenties, cocaine, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, ghettos, the war, the New Deal, polio, civil rights, socialism, washing machines, swimming pools, the Kennedy assassination, the lunar landing. And what, if anything, they make of the Internet.

The e-mail newsletters are without formatting (and therefore impossible to read), the only link in the e-mail body is the unsubscribe link (which I of course innocently clicked hoping that it would take me to a richer version of the newsletter and therefore immediately unsubscribing me), the content is only available in PDF (without graphics or images of course), and when you go on the website you cannot find any of the articles in the newsletters unless you first know the category, topics (not sure what is the difference) or date of submission (who cares?).

In short, the user experience is horrible. Why on earth are people putting up with this? I just don’t understand. Arts managers, wake up!

YET, the newsletter is rich in information about relevant issues. So to make it a bit easier for you, I am attaching the latest newsletter as a download (pdf, 393 kb, 18 pages), a service which is not even available on the Arts Management website (sic).

Because the content deserves it.

Here is a pick from the current issue:

• An interview with Sowon Koo, strategic design division marketer of Designhouse in Korea who talks about “Papertainer”, a trendy exhibition built with
  353 paper tubes and 166 containers, to commemorate the museum’s 30th anniversary.
• An article by two University of Washington Ph.D students who describe two related digital media annotation systems (VideoTraces and ArtTraces) that allow museum visitors to record “traces” of their experiences. Traces are composed of digital visual recordings of the exhibits made or selected by the visitors that are then layered with verbal and gestural annotations.
• A position paper by Max Ross arguing that ‘new museology’ is about the movement towards a more visitor-centred ethos, with museum professionals changing roles from ‘legistators’ to ‘interpreters’ of cultural meaning.
• Dr. Margot Wallace underlines the importance of museum branding, as applied to new museum buildings and museums’ actual survival.
• A UK government paper considers the value of museums. It “recognised and celebrates the importance and achievements of museums in the 21st century while identifying some of the challenges that face them.”

Just dont’ ask me for links to the individual stories.

Abstract

For the first time in history, a wide distribution of technology allows citizens to get involved in public governance and participate in institutional life on a very regular basis. Yet websites of public authorities are barely taking advantage of the power of the participatory citizen.

Two factors play a key role in this gap. First, the average citizen is not well informed about how basic democratic institutions function, which dramatically reduces the citizen’s capacity to influence the democratic process. Websites can help reduce the complexity of public institutions and get people to understand the way institutions and public administrations function and behave. Second, access to public services online is increasingly separated from institutional information. While online service sites are popular, the role of the institutional sites is not clear. The authors argue that these sites can and should take on the role of a two-way communications tool on topics of policy and politics, support knowledge sharing on areas covered by the authority, and create maximum transparency on what the public administration actually does.

To better understand the opportunities, challenges and evolutions that are affecting public institution websites, the authors studied the main sites of 30 public authorities and identified several innovative approaches. A first analysis shows that a lot remains to be improved. Almost all the sites analysed share three characteristics: (1) policy priorities are not concisely communicated and easy to understand, (2) there is only limited innovation in how regional or municipal institutions present themselves; and (3) there are no tools for active participation.

However, some of the studied sites provide elements of innovation that can be used as models and inspirations. The authors conclude that to improve information access, better communication strategies are needed and to increase participation, better usability is of crucial importance.

The magazine also contains Michele Visciola’s review of the book Ambient Findability by Peter Morville.

The peer-reviewed content of User Experience is not available online but printed copies of the magazine can be bought in the UPA Store.

“Global businesses are well along in adopting design thinking to shape their strategies, as well as their products. Now governments are beginning to look to design to solve problems in education, transportation, and defense. In the U.S., moving to a customer-centered legal system is making it easier for people to represent themselves in courts.”

“More Americans than ever before are representing themselves in court, propelled by skyrocketing attorney costs. In big cities, between 70% and 90% of people who go to court for domestic abuse or the loss of their home do so without a lawyer, according to statistics from California and New York. Also, while most courts and legal aid organizations have created Web storefronts where legal forms can be downloaded in seconds, these forms still use complex, often baffling terminology. So people frequently fill them out incorrectly, forcing clerks to redirect and judges to throw out scores of cases.”

“The government and the legal system are slow to innovate. But a team of both design and law students from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) used the latest methods in consumer-focused design to create a powerful tool: the A2J (Access to Justice) Author. This is an interactive software tool with a dynamic digital guide, a 3D avatar on your computer screen that helps you fill out legal forms. A2J Author makes it cheaper, easier, and faster for Americans to represent themselves in court for divorce, small claims, child support, domestic abuse, and landlord-tenant disputes. Courts and legal aid offices in Illinois and Idaho now use A2J Author, and at least 10 other states plan to roll it out in 2007.”

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Also in Inside Innovation is “The Importance Of Great Customer Experiences“, a short article by Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight where she predicts that customer experience will decide the winners and losers in the years ahead

The essay is by far the most intelligent thing I have read on mobile TV in a long time. It is not long, it will take you 5 minutes.

Chipchase’s summary:

Learn ten things you didn’t know about Mobile TV in this essay.

A summary? Its all about a personal experiences; home use is surprisingly popular; watching is a small part of the whole; up to 4 people can view a mobile TV at the same time but the act of sharing changes what it means to be a phone; why accessories are a struggle; design content for changing user postures; immersion is possible but is it desirable?; interactive experiences require interaction which is difficult if the user is not holding the device; everything you wanted to know about very personal media consumption but were afraid to ask; and finally what, how and why people watch in secret.

- Read essay “Mobile TV, Personal Experiences”
- Download associated powerpoint (4.3 mb)

- Download paper “Personal Television” (pdf, 0.2 mb, 8 pages)
- Download associated powerpoint with use cases (7 mb)