Being able to make your own decisions and hold your own views without interference; controlling information about yourself; and being in charge of your personal space - these basic elements of privacy are under threat, according to a new book, The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It, by Kieron O’Hara and Nigel Shadbolt, two computer scientists at the University of Southampton.

While our offline activities are tracked by CCTV cameras, Oyster cards and RFID tags, the details of our online searches and purchases accumulate in databases that know more about us than we’d tell our closest friends. Many of us also broadcast our lives through blogs and social networking sites. “When one’s self as a social entity, with history, with transactions, is all out there, then privacy is not the same old notion,” says Shadbolt, who is professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton and one of the leading scientists shaping the protocols for the future internet.

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In 2005-2006, France Telecom created two structures, the Explocentre and the Technocentre, which work in close collaboration with the R&D laboratories installed all over the world, but are run by the Strategic Marketing Department, which provides the group’s orientations and knowledge of the market.

The Explocentre is an “incubator for R&D projects” and “concentrates on nurturing highly innovative concepts with strong potential, but that could be deemed too risky to be placed directly on the market”. The Explocentre determines their feasibility and potential, and tests new uses and technological breakthroughs before market launch. Interestingly, the centre works with “new methods based on co-creation with customers and partners, using design to drive innovation. Ideas for services are investigated, tested and re-worked with customers to find real value potential.”

Once explored, the most promising concepts are submitted to the Technocentre, which deals with the implementation of these “mature” projects. The Technocentre is responsible for turning them into products ready for the market, either by industrialising them for a commercial launch or by transferring to a spin-off or joint venture for development. The centre brings together around 30 teams consisting of a marketing specialist, a researcher and a network engineer.

So at the one end of France Telecom’s innovation chain there are ideas coming in from R&D, and the company’s industrial partners and employees. Those ideas with high development potential go to the exploration centre, where they are analysed and tested. The integrated strategic marketing in the innovation chain then takes over marketing the product within the technocentre. Finally, agreed projects are integrated into the Group’s Product Roadmap and 3-year plan, which is the other end of its innovation process.

After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou—along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media—about starting a new publishing house and “eating their own dog food.”

Lou is also an active member of the board of directors of UXnet, the user experience network.

Read interview

Most designers place simplicity above all else. We value simple things because they do all the things we need easily and none of the things we don’t. Simplicity is harmonious. Even Leonardo Da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This is one of my favorite quotes, and it plays on the idea that being simple isn’t banal, it’s elegant.

Don Norman recently ignited a discussion about simplicity in his piece Simplicity is Highly Overrated. He observes that although designers treat simplicity as the ultimate goal, many consumers, when faced with a purchase decision, choose complexity instead. He uses examples from shopping in South Korea: people there choose complex, feature-laden electronics and SUVs over simpler ones. Norman says that people choose complexity because they assume a complex product is more capable.

Porter rethinks the discussion as not one about simplicity but as one about the psychology of trade-offs:

Users face a trade-off when they must make a choice between a simple product or a complex product with more features. If they choose the product with fewer features and eventually need some functionality that is missing, they’ve made a bad choice. However, when users choose the complex product with more features, they don’t have to make this trade-off. The complex product is more likely to have the feature users may need in the future.

People are reluctant to make trade-offs because they can’t predict what functionality they will need in the future. Choosing a product with fewer features is a trade-off that could hurt them down the line. When users don’t understand the advantages of each feature, such as when a user is buying her first digital camera, they are much more likely to avoid making a trade-off by choosing the feature-laden product.

When users choose a feature-laden product, they may not be exhibiting a desire for complexity. Instead, users are anxious about predicting their future needs. The black/white distinction of “choosing complexity over simplicity” seems too blunt an instrument to describe the behavior we see from users. Schwartz’ theory suggests that people in this type of situation don’t know enough about the features of a product or their own needs. The result is that users avoid making a trade-off by choosing the one that looks like it has more features.

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(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.)

Case study: using online communities to drive commercial product development [abstract]
Authors: Sheena Lewis (IBM)
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilize an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development. Upper management’s increased interest in user feedback suggests that this development strategy promotes the case for stronger human-centered design processes to be included in corporate strategic planning.

Future Craft: how digital media is transforming product design [abstract]
Authors: Leonardo Bonanni, Amanda Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab)
Abstract: The open and collective traditions of the interaction community have created new opportunities for product designers to engage in the social issues around industrial production. This paper introduces Future Craft, a design methodology which applies emerging digital tools and processes to product design toward new objects that are socially and environmentally sustainable. We present the results of teaching the Future Craft curriculum at the MIT Media Lab including principal themes of public, local and personal design, resources, assignments and student work. Novel ethnographic methods are discussed with relevance to informing the design of physical products. We aim to create a dialogue around these themes for the product design and HCI communities.

“If you build it, they will come … if they can”: pitfalls of releasing the same product globally [abstract]
Authors: Ann Hsieh, Todd Hausman, Nerija Titus and Jennifer Miller (Yahoo, Inc.)
Abstract: As companies based in the US launch more interactive, “Web 2.0”-style products, the rest of the world may not be moving at the same speed. This presentation will reveal the pitfalls of building the same product for all audiences across many countries, especially when it comes to economic, technological, and cultural disparities. This illustrates the point that even if global users want to access new products, they may not always have the means.

What about a ‘local’ wrapper around an ‘universal’ core? [abstract]
Authors: Apala Lahiri Chavan (Human Factors International)
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of restructuring our premise about cross cultural design and explore a possible new way to look at how we can create products in one culture and yet have the whole ‘flat world’ use it!

Studying paper use to inform the design of personal and portable technology [abstract]
Authors: Daniela Rosner, Lora Oehlberg and Kimiko Ryokai (UC Berkeley)
Abstract: This paper introduces design guidelines for new technology that leverage our understanding of traditional interactions with bound paper in the form of books and notebooks. Existing, physical interactions with books have evolved over hundreds of years, providing a rich history that we can use to inform our design of new computing technologies. In this paper, we initially survey existing paper technology and summarize previous historical and anthropological analyses of people’s interactions with bound paper. We then present our development of three design principles for personal and portable technologies based on these analyses. For each design guideline, we describe a design scenario illustrating these principles in action.

(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.)

Empathy and experience in HCI [abstract]
Authors: Peter Wright (Sheffield Hallam University) and John McCarthy (University College Cork)
Abstract: For a decade HCI researchers and practitioners have been developing methods, practices and designs ‘for the full range of human experience’. On the one hand, a variety of approaches to design, such as aesthetic, affective, and ludic that emphasize particular qualities and contexts of experience and particular approaches to intervening in interactive experience have become focal. On the other, a variety of approaches to understanding users and user experience, based on narrative, biography, and role-play have been developed and deployed. These developments can be viewed in terms of one of the seminal commitments of HCI, ‘to know the user’. Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience. In this article, we use ‘empathy’ to help position some emerging design and user-experience methodologies in terms of dynamically shifting relationships between designers, users, and artefacts.

Interactional empowerment [abstract]
Authors: Kristina Höök (Mobile Life center at Stockholm University), Anna Ståhl (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), Petra Sundström (Mobile Life center at Stockholm University) and Jarmo Laaksolaahti (Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
Abstract: We propose that an interactional perspective on how emotion is constructed, shared and experienced, may be a good basis for designing affective interactional systems that do not infringe on privacy or autonomy, but instead empowers users. An interactional design perspective may make use of design elements such as open-ended, ambiguous, yet familiar, interaction surfaces that users can use as a basis to make sense of their own emotions and their communication with one-another. We describe the interactional view on design for emotional communication, and provide a set of orienting design concepts and methods for design and evaluation that help translate the interactional view into viable applications. From an embodied interaction theory perspective, we argue for a non-dualistic, non-reductionist view on affective interaction design.

Healthy technology: a metaphor that pushed user experience to new strategic heights at Intel [abstract]
Authors: Ashwini Asokan and Michael J. Payne (Intel Corporation, Digital Home Group, User Experience Group)
Abstract: One of the biggest struggles user experience teams face is breaking through traditional notions of product strategy, planning and development to bring actionable awareness to the bigger picture around delivering full experiences that people really care about. User research and design is often focused around product & feature design in a space that is defined by out-dated boundaries imposed by history or pre-existing constraints. Research is used to create new features or product direction within these walls, and many design tools are employed to ensure the experience delivered is acceptable. This paper uses a case study of a project titled “Healthy Technology” to highlight the important role that metaphors can play in shifting conversations & strategy, from executive managers to development teams, leading to new boundaries, new strategies, a fresh look at what it means to set direction that targets complete user experiences rather than consumer appreciated features. The metaphor is discussed, through example, as more than a tool for user interface design, exploring the same as a means to alter strategic thinking in upper management as well as guide design and development teams in rethinking notions of technology to create new categories, rethink the problem space and to think beyond features. This paper outlines the research processes that lead to the creation of a metaphor and the functions of the metaphor in overcoming traditional boundaries and thinking. It describes key challenges and methods in this process of moving from research to strategic initiatives that fundamentally shift thinking, providing direction for business models, services, technologies, and industry alignment that come together to provide more than just features or products.

User experience over time
Authors: Evangelos Karapanos (Eindhoven University of Technology), Marc Hassenzahl (University of Koblenz-Landau) and Jean-Bernard Martens (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Abstract: The way we experience and evaluate interactive products develops over time. An exploratory study aimed at understanding how users form evaluative judgments during the first experiences with a product as well as after four weeks of use. Goodness, an evaluative judgment related to the overall satisfaction with the product, was largely formed on the basis of pragmatic aspects (i.e. utility and usability) during the first experiences; after four weeks of use identification (i.e. what the products expresses about its owner) became a dominant aspect of how good a product is. Surprisingly, beauty judgments were largely affected by stimulation (e.g. novelty) during the first experiences. Over time stimulation lost its power to make the product beautiful in the users’ eyes.

User experience at Google – focus on the user and all else will follow [abstract]
Authors: Irene Au, Richard Boardman, Robin Jeffries, Patrick Larvie, Antonella Pavese, Jens Riegelsberger, Kerry Rodden and Molly Stevens (Google, Inc.)
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the User Experience (UX) team at Google. We focus on four aspects of working within Google’s product development organization: (1) a bottom-up ‘ideas’ culture, (2) a data-driven engineering approach, (3) a fast, highly iterative web development cycle, and (4) a global product perspective of designing for multiple countries. Each aspect leads to challenges and opportunities for the UX team. We discuss these, and outline some of the methodological approaches we employ to deal with them, along with some examples of our work.

It is the fourth issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here).

Three-in-One user study for focused collaboration
by Turkka Kalervo Keinonen, Vesa Jääskö and Tuuli Mattelmäki
This article introduces a human-centered design approach, the Three-in-One User Study, which applies a set of methods to speed up and focus on the design process. With a Three-in-One, designers’ face-to-face contacts with users are concentrated into one collaborative designer-user session where preproduced self-documentation material and early design models enable focused collaborative exploration. Three-in-One combines three different complementary points of view to design: users’ subjective interpretations, designers’ focused observations, and design interventions with models. Three-in-One was applied in a kick-bike design case, and it led to improvements to the initial concept, as well as justified decisions for further design development.

The product ecology: understanding social product use and supporting design culture
by Jodi Forlizzi
The field of interaction design has broadened its focus from issues surrounding one person interacting with one system to how systems are socially and culturally situated among groups of people. To understand the situations surrounding product use interaction design researchers have turned to qualitative, ethnographic research methods. However, stripped from underlying theory, these methods can be prescriptive at best. This paper introduces Product Ecology as a theoretical design framework to describe how products evoke social behavior, to provide a roadmap for choosing appropriate qualitative research methods and to extend design culture within HCI by allowing for flexible, design-centered research planning and opportunity-seeking. This product-centered framework is illustrated as a method for selecting a set of design research methods and for working with other research approaches that study people in naturalistic settings.

Design, risk and new product development in five small creative companies
by Robert N. Jerrard, Nick Barnes and Adele Reid
Five small creative companies were studied in detail over extended periods of the New Product Development (NPD) lifecycle. Design was a key aspect of company activity and central to the NPD process. Novel risk-tracking participatory methodologies were developed and employed to identify perceived risks at the outset of NPD and to track risk thereafter. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken on regular basis with company personnel responsible for design to provide rich contextual material. Results showed a wide diversity of perceived risk with little commonality amongst the companies – despite shared core criteria amongst the firms themselves, and the new products that were tracked. Implications for the sampled companies, and wider policy in respect of business support strategy, are considered.

How to rate 100 visual stimuli efficiently
by Yaliang Chuang and Lin-Lin Chen
Perceptual mapping is a method often employed in design and marketing as a means for visualizing consumer perceptions of product alternatives on the market. Perceptual maps can be computed from two types of data, from attribute ratings or from similarity judgments. In this paper, two computer-based methods are proposed for obtaining attribute rating data, based on multiple attribute scales, for a large number of visual stimuli: The hierarchical sorting method was developed from a strategy commonly employed in paper-and-pencil surveys, whereas the divide-and-conquer method was developed from a strategy often utilized in (computer) sorting of algorithms. In tests that used 100 armchairs as stimuli, it was found that both methods received high scores for simplicity and overall satisfaction in subjective evaluations by the participants. The evaluations, however, also showed that each method had its own advantages. While the divide-and-conquer method produced equivalent results in a significantly less amount of time than the hierarchical sorting method, the hierarchical sorting method was considered to have a higher likelihood of expressing actual opinions than the divide-and-conquer method, due to the fact that a participant using the sorting method could focus on the details of the stimuli after they had been grouped by similarity at the initial stage.

Perceptual information for user-product interaction: using vacuum cleaner as example
by Li-Hao Chen and Chang-Franw Lee
The purpose of this study is to identify which product designs for parts and directions are most effective, and then propose how perceptional information could best be designed to facilitate user-product interaction. Three categories of perceptional information for product operational tasks were proposed in this study. Task analysis and usability evaluations were carried out to analyze what information users required while they practiced the operational tasks. Finally, a primary model was proposed that revealed and defined specific types of entities and different perceptual information— Behavioural Information (BI), Assemblage Information (AI), and Conventional Information (CI)— to be significant elements for the model. Information for specific applications that is available for various types of vacuum cleaner parts is described below: 1) for specific operational tasks, these applications for operability, functionality and operational directions are required for the user-part category, and BI and CI provide effective support for the applications; 2) the application for assembly-ability is required for the part-part category, and AI and CI provide effective support for this application; and 3) the applications for operability, functionality, operational directions, and assembly-ability are required for the user-part-part category. BI and CI provide effective support for the applications for operability, functionality, whereas operational directions, and AI and CI provide effective support for the application for assembly-ability.

The nature of design practice and implications for interaction design research
by Erik Stolterman
The focus of this paper is interaction design research aimed at supporting interaction design practice. The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice. Based on a comparison between the notion of complexity in science and in design, it is argued that science is not the best place to look for approaches and methods on how to approach design complexity. Instead, the case is made that any attempt by interaction design research to produce outcomes aimed at supporting design practice must be grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of design practice. Such an understanding can be developed into a well-grounded and rich set of rigorous and disciplined design methods and techniques, appropriate to the needs and desires of practicing designers.

Experientia’s Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken (the author of this blog) are in charge of the afternoon workshop on ethnography.

The event web page explains the importance of empathy in the creation of a successful user experience and stresses the relevance of a user-centred design for small and medium size companies.

The day will start off with a series of presentations:

• Prof. dr. Peter Vink of TNO and TU Delft (Netherlands),
• Anna Kirah, Kirah Consult & Future Alliance (Denmark),
• Matthew White, an independent designer (UK),
• Joannes Vandermeulen and Kristel Van Ael, Namahn (Belgium),
• Alexander Grots, IDEO (Germany).

The afternoon will feature four parallel workshops:

• Workshop 1: Justin Knecht of the Centre for Design Innovation (Ireland) will provide a practical “DIY” manual to understand users (mainly aimed at SME’s).
   
• Workshop 2: Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken of Experientia (Italy) will demonstrate the ‘ethnographic research’ as a new innovation method.
   
• Workshop 3: Jurgen Oskamp and Tim Ruytjens of Achilles Associates (Belgium) will demonstrate the use of ‘personas’.
   
• Workshop 4: Valerie L’heureux of the Human Interface Group (Belgium) will discuss ‘Design Patterns, a perfect technique for user-centred design’.
   

Patricia Ceysens, Flemish Minister of Economy, Enterprise, Science, Innovation and Foreign Trade, will provide the closing speech.

Programme and registration: www.ucd.be

Back to interaction designers. Here’s a concept worth thinking about: many of them don’t want to work for your ad agency. How do I know this? Because I talk to them daily. The most common response I get is, “Why would I want to work on a constant stream of microsites and promotions?” Interaction designers thrive on long-term project engagements. They yearn to sink their teeth into complex problems, wrapping their heads around how they can help solve them.

An agency environment that churns out digital program after program is less appealing — especially when there are opportunities to go work with a start-up, a non-agency or even, perhaps, the future Googles of the world. In an industry built off of the copywriter-art director dynamic duo, it’s time to think about talent in terms of “Renaissance people.” Many interaction designers fit this bill.

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By clicking on Power Search, you can easily limit the regular iTunes search to iTunes U.

Of particular interest to the readers of this blog is Stanford University’s Human-Computer Interaction Seminar, consisting of no less than 36 lectures by people such as Bill Moggridge, Bill Buxton, Elizabeth Churchill, Paul Dourish and Donald Norman.

PCs weren’t necessarily designed for end users in the early days. They were designed for developers to create applications, or corporations to make their workers more productive. But mobile computers, whether they are smartphones, mobile Internet devices, or whatever, are fundamentally different; they’re with us at all times and are used on the go, not as stationary, sedentary terminals. And they are used as social devices, whether that’s planning a get-together with friends, taking pictures at the party, or as the ultimate arbiter of extremely important barroom arguments such as who had the most home runs for the 1993 New York Mets (Bobby Bonilla).

Card focused on the look and feel of the software that accompanies smartphones. He used Apple’s iPhone as his example, and examined how the iPhone was designed according to four different human factors: social, rational, cognitive, and biological. […]

“Mobile computing is much more intimately tied to a user’s life. You need to design simultaneously on at least four levels, and functional design is not the only requirement,” Card said.

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Here some more information on the project:

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

A critical component of the Fluid project is the task of effecting systemic changes within the community source software projects and establishing a viable process for embedding user experience design, knowledge and consciousness into the community development cycle.

The Fluid project is led by the University of Toronto, represented by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, with core participation from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia and York University. Many other universities are contributing resources and expertise. Corporations participating in the project include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Mozilla Foundation, and Unicon.

Take a look at some of his latest posts:

• The design of everyday relationships
  MIT Professor Donald Schön [observed] that design is a “conversation with materials.” In many ways users have become “materials” as much as participants. We not only engage them explicitly through interaction design to create discrete features, but also in aggregate as social systems and platforms amplify their implicit actions to create value.
   
• The siren call of the system
  Well-designed systems are not, in fact, designed. They are the product of evolution. […] Systems, like narratives, take time to reveal themselves to their authors. Changes in technology, consumer preferences, and markets take years to play out. It’s not clear from day one where the system will go or how it will adapt. […] Systems are so rarely produced because they take time and time is one resource companies don’t have. Most die long before the system is revealed.
   
• Apple and the enigma of innovation
  What makes Apple special isn’t design. Or process. Or talent. It’s fear. Fear of the man who is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (And sheathed in titanium.)
  An engineer slaving away on the iPhone SDK isn’t concerned about the industry, his peers, or his boss. His relentless pursuit of “system elegance” is simply an animal’s instinct to avoid pain, manifested largely during the senior management review.
   

Jared Spool, the IA Summit 2008 keynote speaker, posited the idea that UCD was an out-dated methodology that should be retired by the UX community. Why? According to Spool , in the last 30 years, there has not been one website or other digital innovation that can point back to UCD as the defining factor for its success. He floated the idea that design dogma, methodology and formal process were inferior to a well understood shared vision, frequent user feedback and a robust tool box of design tricks & techniques.

Read full story (with Jared Spool presentation)

Winning content persuades, not manipulates
by Colleen Jones
Elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion.

Designing ethical experiences: some practical suggestions
by Joe Lamantia
Unresolved conflicts between stakeholders’ values or perspectives frequently manifest themselves as ethical challenges for designers. Therefore design must find effective ways of managing conflict, encourage the creation of ethical experiences, and avoid ethically unsatisfactory compromises.

Defining experience: clarity amidst the jargon
by Dirk Knemeyer
A definitional model for the fields of experience and guidelines for the use of various terms.

Experience partners: giving center stage to customer delight
by Greg Nudelman
Nudelman proposes the concept of experience partners [as opposed to users] as a whole new way of thinking about our customers as partners in holistic product experiences.

He thinks the “world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods”.

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“Advances in manufacturing technology and the global reach of the Internet have leveled the playing field in the product marketplace. It wasn’t long ago that time-to-market was two years, then 18 months, and then 12 months. Now, a competitor can knock off your “innovation” in six months or less. Many businesses understand that being “new” or “different” is no longer a differentiator. Countless companies are elbowing their way to the top with designs that are also “feature-rich” or “patent pending.” Innovation in product design has lost its meaning and, therefore, its value.

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company’s DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

Companies intending to be relevant today must learn the art of creating experiences that genuinely engage their customers. Choice-fatigued consumers are not looking for another product that hasn’t taken their true needs and desires into consideration. They are looking for companies in which to believe and give their allegiance. They are looking for experiences that cater to their deep-seated desires. This type of engagement requires much more than the latest technological breakthrough: It requires emotional engagement.”

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Julian and (LIFT conference’s) Nicolas Nova are the co-founders of the Near Future Laboratory where client work focuses on developing emerging and conceptual design-technology for new interactive experiences. Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns are his colleagues in the studio.

In a long post on his blog, he explains why he made this decision:

“Time for the next chapter. Shortly, I’ll be officially joining a fantastic little studio within Nokia Design called Design Strategic Projects. It’s a studio of very clever, insightful and thoughtful designers and researchers. It’s a playground of big ideas, and plenty of support to work them through. There are some big questions and even bigger opportunities to continue the work I’ve been doing in the gaps between creative practices, technology and critical analytic thinking.”

Julian was recently in Turin, Italy, as a guest of the Bruce Sterling curated Share Festival, and I met him at a small party organised by the Turin-based participatory planning firm Avventura Urbana.

In his post, Julian also gives some background on the Studio:

The studio was formerly called Insight and Innovation. The work they did in that guise is pretty much exactly the sort of work I should be involved in. It combines analysis, visual storytelling, probes about new interaction paradigms, and speculative near future inquiries into new interaction rituals. One project that recently bubbled up to the public spotlight is called Remade, a phone made entirely from upcycled and recycled materials. It’s actually one central theme in a larger network of principled design projects that are incredibly exciting. What’s more, we’re going beyond talking the talk — appearance models and styling are well and good, but this is a design studio that will be making objects that function, turning their design principles and theory and coupling it tightly to everyday practice. There’s been some recent press about the studio and its people if you want some more insight. In the near future, there’ll be more of a public voice to the studio’s work. This was one of my central discussion points when we started late last summer chatting about my joining the studio, and every rung of the ladder up the leadership, across several international borders has indicated that this is indeed part of the mission.”

Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase is becoming very popular. Just a day after the Economist, now one of the world’s top newspapers has published a 6,000 word feature on him, in its highly regarded Magazine of all places.

“Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.”

Jan, congratulations!

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Speakers included Gillian Crampton Smith, Anthony Dunne, Tim Edler, Frank Jacob, Gesche Joost, Bernard Kerr, Patrick Kochlik, Kristjan Kristjansson, Bill Moggridge, Dennis Paul, Mike Richter and Bruce Sterling.

The videos are now online.

(via Bruce Sterling)