For French readers:

Instruments de design management – Théories et cas pratiques
Cabirio Cautela, Francesco Zurlo, Kamel Ben Youssef, Stéphane Magne
Préface : Gilles Rougon
Editeur : De Boeck
2012

Comment se développe un processus d’innovation guidé par le design (design driven) ? Existe-t-il des règles et des outils de design en mesure de booster l’innovation ? Comment se situe le design management par rapport aux disciplines qui traitent de l’innovation et de ses processus : le project management, le design stratégique, le métaprojet ?

Cet ouvrage veut répondre à toutes ces questions en cernant les frontières et les attributions du design management, dans une optique de gouvernance du processus d’innovation, et en définissant une variété de configurations de projets.

Le grand nombre d’instruments pratiques proposés – ainsi que la méthode RACE (Recherche, Analyse, Conceptualisation, Exécution) permettant leur classification – fournit un guide utile pour comprendre et tracer des parcours d’innovation fondés sur les méthodologies et les principes du design thinking. La structuration de l’ouvrage en chapitres enrichis de synthèses, questions, activités de réflexion et cas réels favorise l’apprentissage des principaux concepts. De plus, un site web propose des corrigés d’exercices pour l’auto-apprentissage de l’étudiant, ainsi que des ressources pédagogiques complémentaires permettant à l’enseignant d’animer des séances de cours et de travaux dirigés.

L’ouvrage s’adresse aux étudiants des cours de design et design stratégique des Écoles d’Architecture, de Design, ou des Beaux-Arts, ainsi qu’aux étudiants des cours de management de l’innovation à l’Université, en Écoles de Commerce et dans les Instituts d’Administration des Entreprises. Il est aussi destiné aux professionnels et aux managers souhaitant mieux appréhender les processus d’innovation guidés par le design.

Putting People First rarely plugs conferences (before they happen) but this one seems intriguing:

RE:DESIGN/UX Design will take place in Silicon Valley on April 29–30, 2013. The events are capped at 125 attendees and the focus is on small-scale, spirited, salon-style discussions with industry leaders and peers.

The theme for 2013 is “James Bond is an Experience Designer: What UXD Can Learn from How Others Think”

“As we hurtle into the future and the concept of “experiences” changes dramatically by the day, what it means to be an “experience designer” is changing, too. At RE:DESIGN/UXD we’ll dive in and see what we can learn about crafting the future of experience by thinking like a British spy, a journalist, a genome-code cracker and beyond.”

The speaker line, very much focused on interactive media and Silicon Valley type software companies, is impressive, with such greats as Peter Merholz, Eric Rodenbeck and Jeff DeVries.

I wonder if they will discuss the rich debate currently unrolling on the changing role of UX research, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Who needs a kettle with four heat settings? A washing machine with a ‘freshen up’ function? A toaster with six browning modes? What happened to the good old days of the on/off switch, asks Tom Meltzer in The Guardian.

“Function inflation or “setting creep” – both of which are names I’ve just made up – is not, of course, confined to the kitchen. We can see it in our computers and cars, our phones and televisions, and, in its purest form, in the deranged one-upmanship of a top-of-the-range Swiss Army knife, complete with a “fish scaler”, a “chisel” and a “pressurised ballpoint pen”. But is the surreal image of a war fought using descaled fish in Switzerland really progress? Or are all these settings just getting in our way?”

“There are better ways to handle spatial ideas,” writes commercial artist Christian Brown, “ways which are more in line with the way our bodies are built. Human hands and fingers are good at feeling texture and detail, and good at gripping things—neither of which touch interfaces take advantage of. The real future of interfaces will take advantage of our natural abilities to tell the difference between textures, to use our hands to do things without looking at them—they’ll involve haptic feedback and interfaces that don’t even exist, so your phone shows you information you might want without you even needing to unlock and interact with it. But these ideas are elegant, understated, and impossible to understand when shown on camera.” [...]

“Like porn, techno interfaces are more focused on what looks good than what feels good. And like porn, it’s pretty hard to get people to stop buying.”

Someone told Intel’s futurist Brian David Johnson that technology could do away with all lying in the future. He was horrified by the idea and wrote this:

The Future of Lying – Can society survive if computers can tell fact from fib?

“There are really two kinds of untruths. First, you have the bad lies, the ones we tell to actively deceive people for personal gain. These are the lies that hurt people and can send you to jail. At the other end of the spectrum are the white lies, the little lies we tell to just be nice—“social lubricant,” as Tony puts it. “It’s like when you bump into someone and say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ You’re really not sorry, but you say it so you can both just move on. These kinds of lies just keep our days moving forward. They keep the friction down between people so that we can get done what we need to do in a world full of people.” You know, the kind of fibs that keep us humans from killing one another.

Between deception and comfort lies a vast expanse of bullshit. Bullshit isn’t lying. Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt explains in his book On Bullshit that the bullshitter’s intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. It is to conceal his or her wishes. Bullshit can be the gray area between doing harm to someone (taking advantage) and making them feel better (white lies). It comes down to a question of intent. Are you bullshitting to be nice, or are you bullshitting to deceive and gain an advantage?

This Liars’ Landscape is helpful because it makes us examine how we could use technology to make people’s lives better while at the same time not making them less human.”

Interaction, the annual interaction design conference organized by IxDA (the global Interaction Design Association), will head to Amsterdam in in February 2014.

Conference chair Alok Nandi asked Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken to be the Interaction14 Lead of Marketing and Communications (Marcomm Lead). Mark (and Experientia) are extremely honored by this request.

Interaction14 will be the second IxDA conference to be held in Europe, following from the successful staging of Interaction12 in Dublin.

IxDA currently has 78,754 members, and about 1000 of them attended Interaction13, which took place a few weeks ago in Toronto.

The Amsterdam conference will offer four days of presentations and workshops from 5-8 February 2014.

Although very much at the beginning of his (volunteer) mandate, Mark – who is not a designer himself – is pushing for the event to aim beyond its confines and reach out to the city and the local design fabric, which seems to be very dynamic, to the global UX and IxDA community (irrespective of whether they can make it to Amsterdam or not), but also to many others who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves designers, but can still be intruiged by the issues many interaction designers face. An event during the Milan Furniture Fair is also in the works.

The planning committee is currently in a very open phase and good ideas are highly welcome. Interaction14 is also looking for sponsors (so pass the word).

2012

One-to-one Tablets in Secondary Schools: An Evaluation Study
(see also here and here)
Dr Barbie Clarke and Siv Svanaes, Family Kids and Youth, UK, 2012
Research was carried out between September 2011 and July 2012 and included a literature review, a review of global evaluation studies, and an evaluation of three secondary schools in Belfast, Kent and Essex that had chosen to give pupils one-to-one tablets in September 2011.

iPad Scotland Evaluation Study
(see also here)
Kevin Burden, Paul Hopkins, Dr Trevor Male, Dr Stewart Martin, Christine Trala, University of Hull, UK, 2012
Case study of mobile technology adoption from eight individual educational locations in Scotland that differ significantly in terms of demographics, infrastructure, the approach of the Local Authority and readiness to implement the use of tablet technology for learning and teaching.

Learning is Personal, Stories of Android Tablet Use in the 5th Grade
(see also here)
Marie Bjerede and Tzaddi Bondi, Learning Untethered, USA, 2012
Project explored the differences in student performance using tablets for writing versus using the more traditional netbooks, as well as the appropriateness of Android devices as an alternative to the popular iOS devices.

The iPad as a Tool for Education – A study on the introduction of iPads at Longfield Academy, Kent
Jan Webb, NAACE, UK, 2012
Research on how the use of tablets in a Kent school impacts teaching and learning.

Decoding Learning: The proof, promise and potential of digital education
Rosemary Luckin, Brett Bligh, Andrew Manches, Shaaron Ainsworth, Charles Crook, Richard Noss, NESTA, UK, 2012
Nesta commissioned the London Knowledge Lab (LKL) and Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI), University of Nottingham, to analyse how technology has been used in the UK education systems and lessons from around the world, in order to set a clear framework for better understanding the impact on learning experiences.

23 Monate #iPadKAS: Review 2012 und Perspektiven (in German)
A.J. Spang, Kaiserin Augusta Schule, Cologne, Germany, 2012
Report on a 23 month iPad program in a German school.

iPad Trial – Is the iPad suitable as a learning tool in schools?
Smart Classrooms, Department of Education and Training, Queensland Government, Australia, 2012
A study in two schools on the use of the iPad, as part of the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s technology initiatives.

2011

Beyond Textbooks: Year One Report
Virgina Department of Education, USA, 2011
Findings on the implications of introducing traditional textbook alternatives into fifteen pilot classrooms

What do Students Think of Using iPads in Class? Pilot Survey Results
Sam Gliksman, School Director at Los Angeles High School and editor of iPadsInEducation, USA, 2011
Results of survey of 126 students.

“There’s an App for That”: A Study Using iPads in a United States History Classroom
Emily R. Carcia, USA, 2011
Study investigates the effect of Apple iPads on achievement in an eleventh grade U.S. history classroom. Spefically, the research explored the impact of the Explore 9/11 application on student achievement.

How are students actually using IT? An ethnographic study
Christopher Cooley, Thomas M. Malaby and David Stack, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA, 2011
An anthropological ethnographic analysis of student practices relating to the use of information technology on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus.

2011 Horizon Report for K12 Education
Larry Johnson, Leslie Conery and Keith Krueger, New Media Consortium, USA, 2011
The NMC Horizon Report series is a research venture that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe.

2010

The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness
Thomas W. Greaves, Jeanne Hayes, Leslie Wilson, Michael Gielniak, and R. Peterson, Project RED, Pearson Foundation, USA, 2010
A detailed report looking at the use of technology in the education sector. The report examines 997 schools and produces outputs for 11 diverse education success measures and 22 categories of independent variables (with many subcategories).

Looking to the future: M-learning with the iPad
Karen Melhuish and Garry Falloon, New Zealand, 2010
Paper explores the potential affordances and limitations of the Apple iPad in the wider context of emergent mobile learning theory, and the social and economic drivers that fuel technology development.

The Effects of Tablets on Pedagogy
Jeremy Vrtis, National-Louis University, USA, 2010
The study examines the effects tablet computers have on the pedagogy of instructors, and students’ perspectives of the instructional uses of the tablet.

Naace, the UK’s educational ICT association, published a report last year (July 2012), entitled “The iPad as a Tool for Education – A study on the introduction of iPads at Longfield Academy, Kent“.

“After a successful implementation at Longfield Academy in Kent and two terms of embedded use, the research shows some incredibly positive impacts on teaching and learning. The report outlines the conclusions of one of the most extensive studies so far undertaken into the use of tablets for learning. As one teacher put it, “The iPads have revolutionised teaching”, with appropriate use of iPads helping to enhance learning across the curriculum and encouraging collaborative learning. Whilst it’s early days for evaluating the impact on achievement, there are significant gains in quality and standard of pupil work and progress and potential for extending use even further. As more schools across the country consider adopting the use of tablets in classrooms, the messages from this research will be incredibly helpful for those who are deciding on their next steps.”

Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester thinks the challenge ahead for wearables is in designing for the human brain.

“No, I’m not talking about sensors implanted in your brain (although that’s certainly possible, and already happening in research and medical settings). I’m talking about designing for the nuanced way our brains process the experience of wearing a device.”

Her recommendations:
- Support rather than distract from goal-oriented behavior
- Increase self-awareness, but not to the point of self-consciousness

Global Ethnographic is a brand new, general interest, peer reviewed web journal featuring the field research and perspectives shaping our social world.

Free and exclusively online, Global Ethnographic is multi-media driven and cross-disciplinary, bringing you the scholarly conversations on daily life as it is lived and experienced around the world.

With embedded links and footnotes in full text articles, video, maps, and other dynamic content, libraries of research are now a click away as you read.

Global Ethnographic is a project from the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development.

Dr. William Gribbons is director of the Master of Science in Human Factors in Information Design and founder and senior consultant of the Design and Usability Center at Bentley University.

An article for UX Magazine describes what he considers to be the four waves of user-centered design.

Videos showcasing two sustainability-related projects are now on Experientia’s YouTube channel. The videos, showing the Ecofamilies and Stories projects respectively, both focus on monitoring domestic energy consumption in different areas of Europe.

The Ecofamilies video (in French with our English subtitles) is a feature on the project by France’s TV France3. For Ecofamilies, Experientia partnered with the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) of Nice, France, and a series of other agencies, for a French sustainability project, aimed at the development of a web platform for a pilot house to monitor domestic energy consumption.

Experientia’s contribution included a benchmark of existing solutions, and guidelines and supervision for the other project partners for conducting user research. We then translated the insights from the user research phase into an initial interface and prototype concept.

From March-June 2012, Experientia conducted participatory co-design workshops with 30 volunteer families. The workshops aimed to discover the real behaviours, attitudes and needs of families when it comes to energy consumption.

The project produced an innovative technological solution that allows families to have a concrete understanding of their energy consumption, and of the choices that are available to reduce it, with personalised tips, and detailed, useful information on household energy use.

The platform has now been implemented in a pilot house in Sophia Antipolis within the CSTB research centre. The outcomes from this pilot project will feed into future developments.

The Stories project is a service concept for monitoring domestic energy consumption, which is accessible while on-the-go.

Together with Telecom Italia, the Turin Polytechnic University, and the ISMB and CSP research centres, Experientia conducted a feasibility study on energy monitoring mobile services. Based on in-depth user research carried out in Turin, we developed a prototype for a mobile application to engage people in monitoring and comparing their energy consumption.

The project demonstrates the feasibility of advanced smart metering services in the Italian context, both from a technological point of view, and from the perspective of the actual user interest.

The project was funded by the Piedmont Region (POR FESR 2007/2013), the European Fund for Regional Development and the Republic of Italy.

(The Stories video is also available on Vimeo.)

Marco Steinberg, who directs the strategic design efforts of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, announced last week that Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab will close in June 2013.

Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra to advance strategic design as a way to re-examine, re-think, and re-design the systems we’ve inherited from the past.

According to Steinberg, “design at Sitra is shifting from a strategic to a service role. The current members of the design team (Bryan Boyer, Justin Cook, and myself*) are committed to strategic design and will therefore pursue this interest beyond Sitra. In the spring Sitra will hire for a new role to grow service design within the organization.”

[* The fourth member of the team, Dan Hill, left earlier, and is now the CEO of Fabrica in Treviso, Italy.]

During the next five months Brian, Justin and Marco will be converting the site into an archive of the most recent phase of HDL. The archive will be legible, free, and open, they write, so that the “work and experience of Helsinki Design Lab be useful not just for the next phase of design at Sitra, but for the community as well.”

The team is now compiling the case study research from Helsinki Design Lab 2012 into a forthcoming publication on stewardship, with a tentative publication date of May 2013. This completes the existing publication “Recipes for Systemic Change,” which you can download for free.

We can also expect a public event in Helsinki on June 10th, 2013.

Over the last years, Experientia has worked intensively – and to our great satisfaction – with Sitra and with the team of the Helsinki Design Lab in particular, through our involvement on the Low2No project. We wish Sitra and the HDL team the very best in the coming months and afterwards, and we are sure that we will find many ways to collaborate in the future.

(For more reflection on the closing, check also this post by Bryan Boyer).

Now and then somebody writes something that you don’t only wholeheartedly agree with, but that is so deliciously written that it’s a pure joy to read.

Ian Eslick, a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-founder of Compass Labs blogs about health and “big data”. In this post he floors you with intensely well crafted statements as “We can only meet the challenge of other’s humanity through the lens of our own” or “There is no god in the machine, only pieces of a puzzle complex beyond our mathematics and the mind of any one of us.”

His main argument is this “Underlying much of the Big Data hype is an implicit, and dangerous belief that “feeding big data to algorithms will yield superior and actionable insight.” It ignores the subtle issues of context that dictates the utility of data and knowledge; the problem is that context is often uncomputable.”

To make his case he cites the 17th Century writings of Francis Bacon who described the four intellectual idols of his day which his methodology was intended to combat, and which remain surprisingly relevant today

Read and enjoy.

Smart Design’s Dan Saffer discusses on Fast Company on how we should interact with the automobiles of the (near) future:

“What will this feel like, riding in our new robot cars? If the experience of being a “driver” in our new cars isn’t designed well, it could feel like we’re trapped in a public taxi, surrounded by screens blaring at us. Robot car is a robot, after all, not human. But there is also another way it could be: like having our own private driver who knows our preferences, our daily routes, the right temperature settings, and how much control of the car we want. These cars will have a personality–although not too much personality–and they’ll know us and conform to us. Their sensors won’t just be trained on the roads and their mechanics; they’ll also be trained on us. They’ll observe us, get to know us, and adapt to us. Our robot cars will respond to being spoken to, and even to unspoken cues by not interrupting us when we’re busy or tired. They will be our moving exoskeletons, acknowledging and respecting our very humanity yet compensating for our limitations by having superpowers like 360-degree vision and the ability to parse traffic data. This is how carmakers will build brand loyalty. We will love our robot cars, and never dream of jet packs again.”

A few weeks back, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) issued “Understanding Electric Utility Customers—Summary Report: What We Know and What We Need to Know.”

One simple statement and the rest of this column is digression: there’s a lot we don’t know about how customers use electricity, what affects their behavior and how to scale up programs that will attract widespread participation. And utilities haven’t exactly knocked themselves out trying to find out what we don’t know.

How customers use and value electricity has been a subject of study and debate for many decades. A better understanding of how customers use electricity could help the industry find ways to improve energy efficiency. In addition, our ability to encourage more efficient consumption through feedback, control technology, and dynamic pricing is better and less costly than it has ever been due to technology advancements.

Despite decades of research into how customers use and value electricity, fundamental questions remain unanswered. This report summarizes the results of an 18-month effort to systematically review the research that has been done to characterize how customers use and value electricity, concentrating on large field trials that have been completed in the past decade or so. The results are summarized by market sector (residential, commercial, and industrial) and by type of behavioral intervention (pricing, feedback and control technology).

Because most of these programs are only offered on a voluntary basis, we further assess what is known about participation (who decides to participate), performance (how customers respond once they are on the program), and persistence (how participation and performance change over time). The state of knowledge is assessed using readiness scoring criteria, which indicate the extent to which knowledge barriers exist that make it difficult to determine the impacts such programs might have, if a given utility were to implement them on a large-scale. Research priorities are also identified to suggest where collaborative research could help resolve major uncertainties.

The detailed results are contained in two reports which synthesize what we know – and what we need to know – about how customers respond to dynamic pricing, feedback and control technology.

Phil Carson of the Intelligent Utility Daily has posted a helpful review of the study.

Samsung is doubling down on technology investments in Apple’s backyard, including two new R&D buildings in Silicon Valley that will house 2,000 staff and a recently announced startup accelerator.

Leading this effort is Young Sohn, who started at Samsung in August as president and chief strategy officer. He has spent a long career leading several successful Silicon Valley semiconductor and storage companies after founding Intel’s PC chipset business and running its joint venture with Samsung in the 1980s.

MIT Technology Review business editor Jessica Leber sat down with Sohn in his office in Menlo Park, California, to talk about his new mandate, why he still uses Apple devices at home, and what his company needs to do to stay ahead.

“I think we have probably the largest platform in the world between the devices and displays and televisions we sell. We actually provide more devices that are interacting with consumers than anyone in the world. But if you think about our experiences, it’s device-centric. It’s experienced by itself. It’s not experienced in a connected way. So we think we can provide a lot more things than what we are doing today with an open ecosystem with our partners.”

Bryan Boyer is the Strategic Design Lead at SITRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund. SITRA is a prominent example of a public institution that has embraced a design approach to exploring social innovation challenges.

Helsinki Design Lab, a platform for advancing strategic design, is illustrative of a changing of the tides. With greater demand for transparency and efficiency, public authorities in Europe can no longer rely on top-down decision-making and are turning to more user-centred processes such as design.

In this interview (pages 10 to 13 of the pdf), we hear about the activities of the Helsinki Design Lab and the new Design Exchange Programme that puts designers in Finnish public authorities.

Companies today are increasingly tying people’s real-life identities to their online browsing habits. Research conducted by the Wall Street Journal on the practices of more than a thousand websites shows that the border between our public and private lives is blurring still more.

“The use of real identities across the Web is going mainstream at a rapid clip. A Wall Street Journal examination of nearly 1,000 top websites found that 75% now include code from social networks, such as Facebook’s FB +0.50% “Like” or Twitter’s “Tweet” buttons. Such code can match people’s identities with their Web-browsing activities on an unprecedented scale and can even track a user’s arrival on a page if the button is never clicked.

In separate research, the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies. One major dating site passed along a person’s self-reported sexual orientation and drug-use habits to advertising companies.

As recently as late 2010, when the Journal wrote about Rapleaf Inc., a trailblazing company that had devised a way to track people online by email address, the practice was almost unheard-of. Today, companies like Dataium are taking the techniques to a new level.

Tracking a car-shopper online gives dealers an edge because not only can they tell if the person is serious—is he really shopping for red convertibles or just fantasizing?—but they can also gain a detailed understanding of the specific vehicles and options the person likes.”

(Make sure to explore the video and the interactive graphics.)

The idea of a unified reputation currency is starting to take hold online, writes Josh Klein in the blog of the Harvard Business Review.

“With broad agreement that reputation is a form of value, and various mechanisms already existing to score people and institutions on it, convergence on one metric seems achievable—even inevitable.

It’s an enormously appealing idea. Imagine you could type in my name or email address or social software account and get a single number by which to judge whether you should do business with me—or indeed whether you should bother reading my point of view. What if, as a business, you could get a single number to determine how much to discount your product for a particular customer (because they might promote the product if they like it) or better yet, increase the price for those unlikely to enhance its appeal to others? Regardless of your motivation, having a single number to replace what would be a messy evaluation would be a huge convenience that computers seem ideally suited to provide.

But the idea is fatally flawed. As someone who is subject to hysterical bouts of techno-utopianism myself, I can recognize the signs. We want a single number to evaluate other people by, and it really, really, really seems possible, so it must be so. Except that it isn’t.

It’s nearly impossible firstly because reputation is so deeply context-dependent.”

[My emphasis]