Reuters report on mobile coupons and gifts in South Korea:
|
| Posts in category 'Asia' |
|
9 May 2008
|
|
9 May 2008
|
![]() |
Putting People First announces the launch of EMweekly, a compilation on Emerging Markets starting with this week’s issue on the theme of the booming Indian mobile industry.
Compiled by Niti Bhan and David Tait (of the Emerging Futures Lab), EMweekly will focus on a wide ranging selection of news, links and articles as well as analysis and indepth stories from the developing world. You can also receive the EMweekly via rss or email.
Recently Experientia extended its services with qualitative user research and experience design capabilities in emerging consumer markets in developing nations such as in Sub Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia etc. This new offering is founded upon a recent structural collaboration between Experientia and three emerging market specialists — Niti Bhan (based in Singapore), Claude Martin (based in France), and David Tait (based in South Africa) — and an extensive research project in Africa we just completed for a major technology company. |
|
2 May 2008
|
![]() |
From a corporate press release:
Marc Laperrouza (of LIFT) comments:
|
|
1 May 2008
|
![]() |
The April issue of the International Journal of Design has recently been published.
It is the fourth issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here).
|
|
7 April 2008
|
|
1 March 2008
|
|
24 February 2008
|
|
22 January 2008
|
![]() |
Nokia announced today that it unveiled two handsets that offer a range of useful features and colours aimed at consumers in emerging markets. Interestingly they have each been designed based on extensive user research.
Nokia 2600 classic for personalisation
Nokia 1209 for phone sharing
Nokia now also has a dedicated website devoted to user research and phone designs for emerging markets, with PDF downloads and video material. |
|
2 January 2008
|
![]() |
A few weeks ago, I published a summary of a talk given by Donghoon Chang, vice president of Samsung’s Mobile User Experience Design Group, at the recent Mobile HCI conference in Singapore.
The summary was originally published in Italian on the website of the Italian innovation supplement Nova by Prof. Luca Chittaro. Today Chittaro published the second part of his summary, which you find translated below:
|
|
2 January 2008
|
![]() |
The December issue of the International Journal of Design has recently been published and is strongly focused on the experiential and sensorial qualities of digital products and services.
It is the third issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here). Jonas Löwgren wrote an article on fluency to illustrate the experiential qualities of digital products and services. Fluency “refers to the degree of gracefulness with which the user deals with multiple demands for her attention and action, particularly in augmented spaces where the user moves through shifting ecologies of people, physical objects, and digital media.” There are also articles on sound as part of the overall experience of a product’s expression, tools for including user-interaction in materials selection, lead-user innovation in the design-based outdoor clothing and equipment sector in the northwest of the United Kingdom, and on artistic inquiry as a means to inform interdisciplinary research. |
|
27 December 2007
|
![]() |
On this University of Washington video broadcast Tapan Parikh describes his experiences developing CAM - a toolkit for mobile phone data collection - in the rural developing world.
Designing technologies for an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and capabilities of potential users. Drawing from the results of an extended participatory design study conducted with microfinance group members in rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), he outlines a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such users. The results of this study are used to motivate the design of the CAM toolkit, which includes support for paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and disconnected operation. Parikh discusses possible topics for future work and his long-term research vision. (via Niti Bhan) |
|
15 December 2007
|
![]() |
Prof. Luca Chittaro, who writes for the Italian innovation supplement Nova, recently participated at the Mobile HCI conference in Singapore and was taken by the user experience design talk of Donghoon Chang, vice president of the Mobile User Experience Design Group at Samsung.
He reports on it on his Italian blog and here is my translation:
|
|
13 December 2007
|
![]() |
Niti Bhan reviews “The White Man’s Burden“, William Easterly’s recent book on foreign aid and economic development challenges in the ‘third’ or ‘developing’ world:
|
|
11 December 2007
|
![]() |
All kinds of things apparently, as described by this revealing story on the BBC, commented on by Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week:
The project clearly suffers from a top-down approach, where “designing for” is the paradigm rather than “designing with” or “designing from”. There was as far as I know no structured needs analysis here, no contextual studies, no ethnography, no qualitative insights. Such an approach cannot lead to anything but unintended consequences and may be potentially undermining the project itself. There are many lessons to be learned here, by the OLPC (”one laptop per child”) team, but also by any company or organisation trying to deliver designed solutions for “end-users” who then turn out to have different needs and contexts that had somehow been anticipated. But of course, we can always blame those “end-users” instead of learning some important lessons, and I am afraid this is definitely going to be part of the debate that will undoubtedly ensue. |
|
11 December 2007
|
![]() |
Niti Bhan is a very regular source of inspiration on this blog, on her own site, on Core77, and elsewhere. She is a thorough thinker and has some very valuable insights to contribute on what design in emerging markets really means.
So I asked her to write a short essay for the website of Torino 2008 World Design Capital precisely on that topic. She accepted and wrote a great story. Just a few lines to wet your appetite:
(Thanks Allan for plugging it so quickly.) |
|
8 December 2007
|
![]() |
Newsweek reports on how mobile banking in India saves the government and banks money and reduces fraud that plagues the public-distribution system.
The article profiles activities of Reliance Communications, ekgaon technologies, and A.Little.World. |
|
3 December 2007
|
![]() |
The TED conference has published its video of the talk by Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase in March this year:
|
|
26 November 2007
|
![]() |
Aparna Kalra reports in Mint, a new Indian business newspaper produced in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal, on how the trend of cool hunting - and then innovating - in India by companies also illustrates how the country is moving higher in the food chain in product research and development.
|
|
25 November 2007
|
![]() |
The French newspaper Le Monde has published a special report on Samsung, including a highly visual special on Samsung’s design strategy, which by the way features glimpses of a few rather interesting looking presentation slides (the design goal is to create a culturally-based emotional experience, which goes beyond identity and originality, whereas the design philosophy describes an iterative “emotional journey” circle between intuition, delight and desire).
In the interest of sharing this story with non-French speakers, here is my translation:
Design at the heart of the Samsung strategy “We have three levels of design analysis: global design intelligence, future design intelligence and corporate design implementation,” says Harry Choi of Samsung’s Corporate Design Center. The text below is based on an interview with him:
Two products, two design strategies “When we think of a printer nowadays, we think of a noisy, ugly and cumbersome object,” says Jun Won Bae, designer of the SCX 4500 printer. “That was at least the result of our preliminary studies. Based on these findings and on a clear public demand, we decided to devote more attention to the design. We ended up with a trendsetting product.” “We focussed on four reference values to change the traditional mindset people have of a printer:
This small printer is aimed at the SoHo market (small office and housing) but it has a premium price. We want to bring design intot the office, as Apple has successfully done these last few years. In fact, Apple is the exclusive distributor of this product on the American market. The manufacturing of this printer requires a multitude of skills: mechanical, micro-electronics, chemical (for the inks), and software. This is why there are so few players in this market segment and the Chinese for instance are not attacking us here. We are for now just focusing on a particular sector — laser printers — where we already master the technology. Since we can no longer conquer the market by making conventional printers, we put our energy on design. And for the moment, this strategy is working.” There is also an interview in this section with the designer of the G800 touch phone.
A university dedicated to R&D In 1995, Samsung created a design school in Seoul. The Samsung Art and Design Institute (SADI) has meanwhile become a real study laboratory for the group. Originally the school was dedicated to graphic design and fashion styling. But in the last two years it has opened itself up to industrial design and technology design. Here are some of the student prototypes [which do not seem to be based on much user research].
The report also contains a slideshow of products about to be launched on the market. |
|
22 October 2007
|
![]() |
Seoul was designated as the “World Design Capital (WDC) 2010” by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) on the last day of its congress in San Francisco, Saturday, according to the city government Sunday, reports the Korea Times.
- Read full story |
Experientia news
The Usability Professionals' Association is proud to announce the first European Regional UPA ...
Experientia just resolved its email breakdown with its provider and we are now back to ...
This year’s World Usability Day (WUD), a global series of events organised by the Usability ...
The first European regional conference of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) will take ...
is powered by WordPress



















