John Pavlus reflects in the MIT Technology Review on a short essay by Gary Marcus in the New Yorker about the ethical quandaries raised by Google’s driverless car.

“The real problems that artificially intelligent cars will bring with them,” he says, “aren’t the grand techno-ethical abstractions mulled over by the Singularity Institute, but practical issues of product and interface design, constrained by the usual vicissitudes of politics and economics. For better or worse, it’s the designers, lawyers, and consumers—not the philosophers or academics—who will be the ultimate arbiters of what passes muster as a “moral machine.’”

The full service design agency Pars Pro Toto in Ghent, Belgium built the “Wereld van Nestor” [Nestor's World], a social design tool meant to help local governments in Flanders create a better world for their elderly citizens.

The tool is built on 10 personas and their experience with eight different topics. These eight topics – housing, mobility, public spaces and the built environment, social participation, respect and social engagement, active participation and employment, communication and information, public and health services – are areas where local government can make a real difference for their elderly citizens. They are based on the WHO report Global age-friendly cities.

Local governments can now construe their senior citizen plans based on the relevance and impact of their planned services on one or more of these personas.

The project came about through a collaboration with the Social Welfare Agency of the City of Ghent, and with the support of Design Flanders. The research that it was based on is not very clearly described, but the site mentions interviews and workshops.

For now the tool only exists in Dutch (and the socio-cultural context is also distinctively Flemish), but if you have any special questions, please contact Johan Bonner (info@parsprototo.be) on +32 (0)9/244.62.20.

Our friends of Adaptive Path have uploaded (nearly) all videos of UX Week 2012, the premier user experience design conference that took place in August in San Francisco.

KEYNOTES

Ducks, dolls, and divine robots: designing our futures with computing [46:26]
Genevieve Bell, director of User Interaction and Experience in Intel Labs
No abstract available.

The story of Windows 8 [1:06:57]
Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team.
No abstract available.

TALKS

Steal like an artist [25:51]
Austin Kleon, writer and artist
When somebody calls something “original,” 9 times out of 10 they just don’t know the sources or references involved. The truth is that nothing is completely original — all creative work builds on what came before. In this talk, Kleon will teach you how to embrace influence, establish a creative lineage, and think of yourself as a mashup of what you let into your life.

The power of “why?” [21:31]
Bill DeRouchey, creative director at Simple
Designers must continually learn to survive. New technologies, new philosophies, new roles and responsibilities, new tools and methods all keep designers on their toes throughout their career. But one skill persists no matter where designer find themselves, the ability to ask Why?
Asking customers why they do what they do or believe what they believe unlocks the foundation for inspired design. Asking organizations why they follow their strategies unearths good habits or dangerous ruts. Asking our most traditional institutions why things are the way they are uncovers the potential to remake our society. Constraints, myths, assumptions and perspectives can all melt with a well-timed and well-framed Why?
Let’s apply some toddler magic to our adult careers and ask Why?

Toy inventing in the 21st Century: hard plastic vs the attention economy [20:10]
Bill McIntyre, President of Atomocom
As surely as the digital era transformed work and home life, it changed the way kids play. Like their parents, kids are choosing technology, tablet computers and video games over traditional toys at younger ages than ever. So how do traditional toy inventors compete for a kid’s interest against iPad apps and 24 hour cartoon networks?

Build the future!! [31:10]
Brian David Johnson, futurist at the Intel Corporation
What kind of future do you want to live in? What futures should we avoid? What will it feel like to be a human in the year 2025. Intel’s Futurist Brian David Johnson explores his futurecasting work; using social science, technical research, statistical data and even science fiction to create pragmatic models for a future that we can start building today.

Go with it: learning by doing [26:15]
Brianna Cutts, Visitor Experience and Exhibits Director at the Bay Area Discovery Museum
The pressure is on more than ever now that “creativity” is the hot 21st century skill and American creativity is on the decline. What should we do?
Design educational experiences that don’t feel educational.
During her talk, Brianna shares insights from a career in exhibition design, which requires a delicate balance of content knowledge, design skill and rule breaking.

The future will be made of screens [21:58]
Rachel Binx, design technologist at Stamen Design
No abstract available.

Citizen experience: Designing a new relationship with government [26:48]
Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America
Code for America proposes what to many seems impossible: that interfaces to government could be simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Why care? Because the slow crumbling of our will to do things together as a society (what we used to call support for government) is a direct consequence of the public sector falling behind on modern technology and design. Who is fixing this? Talented, passionate designers and developers partnering with public servants in City Halls around the country.

iWitness case study [27:01]
Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and chief creative officer of Adaptive Path
From developing the concept through designing the experience to collaborating with an agile development team, Jesse will tell the story of creating Adaptive Path’s groundbreaking social media tool, iWitness.

UI for Big Data visualization [25:16]
Jonathan Stray, head of the Overview Project, a Knight News Challenge-funded semantic visualization system for very large document sets
Visualization is great way to understand data, but it breaks down when the data gets big. Simply plotting everything to the screen won’t work, because there isn’t enough screen real estate, interactions slow to a crawl, and human working memory isn’t up to the task anyway. Big data requires specific interaction techniques for visual exploration, such as filtering, summarization, and context. He goes over some basic principles, and shows examples of recent systems, including his work on the Overview Project, a system for visual exploration of huge unstructured document sets.

Testing positive for healthcare UX [18:27]
Maren Connary, Kaiser Permanente
The healthcare experience is improving even though we’ve almost all had a less-than-pleasant memory of either waiting endlessly for an appointment, forgetting when and what dose of meds to take, crying over massive and unpredictable bills, or even just locating decent care in the first place. All of these mounting complaints and expenses have finally pushed healthcare to the tipping point. As a result, a patient-centered paradigm has emerged that is forcing organizations to more closely examine and improve the experiences they provide.

Two brains, one head: analysis and intuition in design practice [23:44]
Maria Cordell, Design Director at Adaptive Path
Often connected to the unexplained or mysterious, intuition gets a bad rap. Yet intuition is at the heart of creativity, and significant advances in our understanding of the physical world are borne of intuitive leaps. While some hail its power, others advocate that what’s needed is more analysis — not intuition! What does this mean for us? What is intuition and why is it so divisive? And does it have a role in design?

Fashioning Apollo: the infinite, intimate lessons of technology, bureaucracy, and human beings in the space race [31:46]
Nicholas de Monchaux, architect and urbanist
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, the spacesuits they were wearing were made, not by any of the sprawling, military-industrial conglomerates who had forged the hard surfaces of their rockets or capsules, but rather by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand, “Playtex.” The victory of Playtex over the military-industrial establishment, and the soft, 21-layer suit that trumped hard, system-designed prototypes, is only one of the many stresses and strains that characterized the rapid effort to insert soft, human beings into military-industrial machinery originally intended for warheads, and nuclear destruction. And while it may seem—at least initially—that the process of designing for human beings is a less high-stakes enterprise than the summit of the Cold War, many of the seemingly otherworldly lessons of man, and technology, on the moon, remain urgent examples for our machines, cities, and ecologies today

UX is strategy; not design [25:26]
Peter Merholz, head of user experience at Inflection
In trying to understand the challenges the UX community has had in clarifying what the “UX profession” is, it occurred to Peter that we’re thinking about this all wrong. Though UX finds its genesis in design disciplines, user experience is not a design activity. In order for user experience to deliver on its potential, we need to reframe it so that it contributes directly to strategy, and, in doing so, drives practices throughout the organization.

Cars, castles, and spas [28:09]
Rob Maigret, SVP of Global Creative at Disney Interactive, the digital entertainment and games segment of The Walt Disney Company
From the time he was in his teens, Rob had heard about the lucky few who traveled to Germany to pick up their brand new Porsche automobiles at the factory and take them for an extended drive on the autobahn at great speeds. On the journey, they enjoyed beautiful scenery and Euro-luxury before having their cars shipped to the states for a much more prosaic driving experience. This year, he finally decided to check it out for himself. Maybe someday you will, too. Maybe you won’t. But either way, in terms of UX, this might be is as serious as it gets for fully experiencing a brand at its core.

Death to curiosity: will tomorrow’s [21:25]
Toi Valentine, experience designer at Adaptive Path
If the previous generation was responsible for defining UX, what is the next generation of UX practitioners responsible for? What opportunities exist for them? What impact will they have on UX? On the world? After collecting personal experiences from designers right out of UX-related programs and those with more than ten years of experience, Toi reflects on the challenges and opportunities that come with finding your way in UX. Without clear pathways and destinations, how will the next generation find their way? How can the discipline and UX community support them in their journey to impact the future of UX?

An animating spark: mundane computing and the web of data [42:19]
Tom Coates, founder and president of Product Club
Network connectivity is reaching more and more into the physical world. This is potentially transformative – allowing every object and service in the world to talk to one other—and to their users—through any networked interface; where online services are the connective tissue of the physical world and where physical objects are avatars of online services. It’s a world where objects know who owns them and can tell the world where they are. A world where ‘things’ are services, and where their functions can be strung together in daisy chains across the planet. Now the only question is how we make it useful and comprehensible for normal people…

How and why to start sketchnoting [19:40]
Veronica Erb, user experience designer at EightShapes LLC
When you attend a presentation, what do you do? Sit quietly and listen? Scribble notes? Live tweet? Get distracted by your smartphone?
There’s yet another option: sketchnote.
Sketchnoting is like notetaking, but with more flair and more focus. Hand lettering and illustrations provide the flair; focus provides you the time to include the flair. Besides keeping you engaged during talks, visual notetaking makes it easier to retain what you’ve heard and share it later.

Driven by marketing tick lists and a seeming disregard for how ordinary people will use their products, manufacturers have simply chucked more and more features into their sets until existing user interfaces have creaked at the seams with it all.

Even new UIs, designed from the ground up – you’d have thought – to deal with the vast array of content accessible through a smart TV would have improved matters. But no, vendors have instead been content with flinging smartphone-style UIs at big screens in the hope that the buzz surrounding ‘apps’ will stick.

Nigel Whitfield reports for The Register

Expereal is a free iPhone app developed to help people better understand themselves, to feel even more connected to the world, and to, hopefully, make more informed decisions about their lives. The marketplace has social media platforms, physical measurement products and mood apps and sites, but nothing that simply helps answer the question: “How’s my life going now compared to other time periods (and people and places)… and WHY?” A useful personal life quality tool.

The app was inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, specifically his discussion of the Experiencing and Remembering Selves. Kahneman describes that as we recall past events – whether past relationships, jobs or vacations — we typically remember their totality in how they ended, NOT how we actually experienced them, regardless of their duration. Interestingly, this cognitive bias also impacts how we think about our lives in the present. For example, if someone asks how our lives are going right after a great date or incredible meal, our response tends to be positive. It’s difficult to counterbalance this “peak end bias” to view our lives more holistically. Expereal aims to help us in this endeavor, simply and beautifully, by essentially allowing us to remember our “experiencing selves”.

Read more on BoingBoing

Pulled from store shelves after a month, the first high-profile wearable activity tracker was a humiliation for Jawbone. Now, the Up is back, and anyone vying for a stake in wearable tech should pay close attention to the product’s resurrection, according to Fast Company.

Interestingly, Jawbone advocates an entirely new (and rather questionable) use of the term ‘ethnographic’.

“Their own internal product testing was coupled with what Jawbone calls “one of the largest ethnographic studies you could imagine.” While they say most consumer gadgets might see eight weeks of limited field testing, theirs lasted 46 weeks, or just short of three million hours of beta testers living with the Up.”

In fact, it was more about a huge series of iterative prototypes:

“It was ultimately ‘hundreds and hundreds of different designs, each being tested one by one’ that evolved the Up into what’s returning to store shelves today. That’s hundreds and hundreds of different designs that the end user will never see, that can’t be slapped on a box as a selling feature, and that very few small companies could ever afford to do. But in the end, the Up may go down in history as one of the first wearable devices that just works (the second time around, at least).”

The role of UX Strategist is a relatively new one on UX design teams, and has recently addressed in two articles on UXmatters: “UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered Design” and “What Does a UX Strategist Do?“.

To provide more insight, Paul Bryan, manager of the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn and organizer of the the first international UX Strategy Conference (which will take place in Atlanta next year), interviewed three UX strategists at well-known companies: Nicole Netland of Best Buy, Rick Castanho of Lowe’s and Stephanie Sansoucie of Kohl’s.

“[Given the secrecy and confidentiality of what UX Strategists work on], the best that I can do is to continue to explore the topic of UX strategy tangentially, using knowledge that I can share openly to help push back the boundaries of secrecy. And that’s the spirit in which these three UX Strategists approached this interview, too. If, when reading their answers, it seems to you that we’ve omitted something important, it’s probably because we have. What I find most interesting about these interviews—besides the window that they provide into UX strategy practice—is that, while they begin by describing widely disparate evolutions of the discipline of UX strategy within specific organizations, they end with very compatible, even overlapping visions of the future.”

Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities
Edited by Brigitte Jordan
Left Coast Press
November 2012, 224 pages
[Amazon link]

Abstract
In this innovative volume, twelve leading scholars from corporate research labs and independent consultancies tackle the most fundamental and contentious issues in corporate ethnography. Organized in pairs of chapters in which two experts consider different sides of an important topic, these provocative encounters go beyond stale rehearsals of method and theory to explore the entanglements that practitioners wrestle with on a daily basis. The discussions are situated within the broader universe of ethnographic method and theory, as well as grounded in the practical realities of using ethnography to solve problems in the business world. The book represents important advances in the field and is ideal for students and scholars as well as for corporate practitioners and decision makers.

Brigitte Jordan, PhD, an independent consulting corporate anthropologist, has held positions as Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Learning, Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, and Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics and Human Development at Michigan State University. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Corporate Research Award in Excellence in Science and Technology from the Xerox Corporation and the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Dr. Jordan specializes in research methodologies and the design of lifescapes of the future. She is the author of almost one hundred scholarly, technical, and professional publications, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Japanese. Her website is www.lifescapes.org.

Download excerpt
Table of contents

Dan Turner discusses why the experience of reading a book on tablets (iPads in particular) is a chore rather than a delight.

In a long article for UX Magazine, he discusses a number of reasons, often related to usability and even biology, why that may be so:

• The physicality of books is linked to comprehension and memory, and reinforces focus and comprehension
• The glossy, reflective screen is a physical strain, degrading the reading experience
• The combination of thinness with weight puts a physical stress on your hands that a book does not
• As a light source often used in darkened environments, potentially disrupt our sleep cycles
• Due to the regular notifications we receive on our tablets, we are easily distracted and find it hard to achieve concentration or flow
• We are conditioned to see screens as ‘work’ or ‘entertainment’ devices, again making it hard to enjoy a reading experience on them

So, he asks, what could we as hardware, system, and app designers do to help reduce distraction? And how can serious user research help us in that?

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Tables, counters and whiteboards will eventually become displays. Meeting rooms will have touch panels, and chalk boards will be replaced by large systems that have digital images and documents on a display that teachers can mark up with a stylus.

A TechCrunch article contains comments by Microsoft General Manager Jeff Han; Jim Spadaccini of Ideum, which makes large interactive displays; cyborg anthropologist Andrew Warner; Amber Case, co-founder of Geoloqi, the mobile, location-based company; and Matt May, an accessibility evangelist who works for Adobe.

This past week featured a worldwide experiment conducted via a mobile app: The Human Face of Big Data. On September 26, 2012, Against All Odds Productions launched a smartphone and tablet app. With it, users could map their daily footprint through GPS, share a picture of what brings them luck, and get a glimpse into the one thing people want to experience during their lifetime. Why was this done?

Rick Smolan believes in the concept of “big data”, the idea that it is possible to analytically process massive amounts of data in order to derive insights into problems facing the world. Without most people even realizing it, your smartphone is collecting a lot of data on a daily basis. Where you have been. Who you have been calling. What businesses do you like. Most of this data is used for marketing or discarded after temporary usage by your apps. But what if this data could be harnessed?

The Human Face of Big Data app allows volunteers to provide demographic information through a series of questions. Then, through the rest of the week, the smartphone’s sensors were keeping a log of how far people traveled, how fast, and where they were going. While this may mostly be interesting to social scientists, Smolan is doing this to show just how much information people are already sharing passively. He believes that big data will have a more transforming effect than the internet itself.

On October 22nd, 2012, Philips Design organized a special seminar and workshop to explore how businesses can innovate by translating ‘Big Data’ into value for people.

The internet is becoming ever more intertwined with our daily lives, even more so now that mobile platforms are blurring the dividing line between the online and physical worlds. Data now touches so many parts of our lives that our world is becoming a composite of digital and real. Data is pervasive, abundant and constantly changing how the world operates. Tapping into this wealth of Big Data has huge potential for data-enhanced businesses that are creative and capable of making data meaningful and relevant for people.

The global economic environment is uncertain. The business environment is undergoing massive changes wrought by the advent of digitization, and there is an urgent need for a faster, more responsive relationship between the enterprise and its consumers and partners. In a data-driven world, action and feedback between an enterprise, customers and consumers is fast and creates many choices in potential propositions. This ‘Virtuous Circle of Data‘ will enable enduring propositions that deliver personalized, meaningful value – more individually tailored and adapted to the ever-changing context of the consumer than has been possible before.

Philips Design has developed an understanding approach and models to working with data in the 21st century. These models are contemporary, actionable, informative and communicated using a workshop process fit for use now and tomorrow. This can help you to make the next step and innovate with big-data management and visualization – the investment call here is in creativity coupled with some understanding of the technology.

Participating speakers at the seminar were Pieter Hermans, CEO Jakajima; Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer, Royal Philips Electronics; Maarten den Braber, Quantified Self; Professor Yi-Ke Guo, Digital City Exchange (Imperial college London); Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross, Catalogtree; and Jeroen Tas, Chief Information Officer, Royal Philips Electronics.

Video 1 [59:27] / Video 2 [1:36:38]

(via InfoDesign)

NEXT Service Design is the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin. It focuses on design methods including design thinking, user-centric design and interaction design.

Two videos are currently online.

Strategy is a Service! What business leadership can learn from service design
Alexander Baumgart, Systemic Partners
An exploration (and provocation) on how service design does create new perspectives on (and for) strategy and planning practices – at helping leadership harness the in- and out-bound powers of a holistic human-centered design approach to leverage lasting competitive advantage.

The Experience is the Product
Pedro Custódio, Experience Designers
We’ve been riding on a wave of consumerism since the best part of last century, product of the industrial and services revolutions, the amount of products and services outpaced even the most wild thinkers. There’s just to much of everything! Choices are good, but hard to make! Product features first, product design next used to be central to developing new products and attached services, but clearly we’ve passed those days, so if it’s not about features, nor it’s design how do we create meaningful and attractive differentiation for our future products and services propositions? This is the question that Custódio works to solve and this presentation gives a bit more insights on how we can tailor amazing experiences in order to create valuable futures.

(via InfoDesign)

The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world? A challenge that Bruce Sterling describes as “‘experience design’ problems”. Alexis G. Madrigal explores it in The Atlantic:

“If you pick up a book, do you see a biography of its author, an analysis of the chemical composition of its paper, or the share price for its publisher? Do you see a list of your friends who’ve read it or a selection of its best passages or a map of its locations or its resale price or nothing? The problem for Google’s brains, as it is for all brains, is choosing where to focus attention and computational power. As a Google-structured augmented reality comes closer to becoming a product-service combination you can buy, the particulars of how it will actually merge the offline and online are starting to matter.

To me, the hardware (transparent screens, cameras, batteries, etc) and software (machine vision, language recognition) are starting to look like the difficult but predictable parts. The wildcard is going to be the content. No one publishes a city, they publish a magazine or a book or a news site. If we’ve thought about our readers reading, we’ve imagined them at the breakfast table or curled up on the couch (always curled up! always on the couch!) or in office cubicles running out the clock. No one knows how to create words and pictures that are meant to be consumed out there in the world.”

On Saturday 27 October, the Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano will host the 4th edition of the UXconference.

The 2012 edition of the conference, which is organised by the Sketchin team, will focus on the relationship between digital services and people’s lives, with particular attention on the home and the city.

Speakers this year come from Switzerland, Italy, US and UK, and include Carlo Ratti from MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab, Stefan Klocek and Chris Noessel from Cooper, and Experientia senior partner Jan-Christoph Zoels.

Jan-Christoph will discuss supporting sustainable lifestyles.

The latest issue of Interfaces, the quarterly magazine of the Interaction Specialist Group of the BCS, the British chartered institute for IT, is devoted to Slow HCI, or how to design to promote well-being for individuals, society and nature.

Here are the key articles:

Invisible stable interfaces
Kai A. Olsen, University of Bergen and Molde University College, and alessio Malizia, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, explore the importance of maintaining stable interfaces for efficient workflow and ask companies to consider how to minimise disruption to experienced users when bringing out new versions.

Design for happiness
Anna Pohlmeyer, Delft University of Technology, translates positive psychology into positive design and outlines 20 opportunities to design for happiness.

Birds of a feather
Email is recognised as a major productivity disabler. Karen renaud, Glasgow University, and Judith ramsay, University of the West of Scotland, present a flighty perspective on emailers’ behaviours.

Future HCI
Daniel Gooch and Ryan Kelly from Bath University reflect on a future for HCI where interactions are slow and reflective, more intimate, creatively and innovatively combining aspects of the physical and digital world to promote fulfilling experiences.

The ITT Group
Professor Lynne Baillie provides an overview of her team, the Interactive and Trustworthy Technologies research Group at Glasgow Caledonian University, and some of their current projects.

New centre, new challenge
Lorna McKnight, University of oxford, introduces a new research centre exploring assistive learning technologies and reflects on the difficulties and value of researching this area.

My PhD
Andrea Bellucci: Prototyping Natural Interaction

Massive Open Online HCI
Alan Dix, Talis and University of Birmingham, describes some of the inspirations and challenges he faces as he prepares to run a massive open online HCI course.

Other recent issues of Interfaces:

Interfaces 91 – Summer 2012 – Reviewing HCI (pdf)
HCI research in the UK: funding, reflection and the future

Interfaces 90 – Spring 2012 – Work, Rest and Play (pdf)
HCI crosses physical and digital boundaries

Interfaces 89 – Winter 2011 – What’s Hot in HCI? (pdf)
It’s difficult to get consensus from our multidimensional discipline

Mind Design, the Design Research Webzine of the Danish Centre for Design Research, contains a wealth of information, all available in English.

Here are some highlights:

Article
Companies: Design Research Works in Practice
Design researchers are developing new, applicable knowledge together with organisations in the private and public sector. That was the clear conclusion at the mini-conference on the impact of design research that the Danish Centre for Design Research held at The Black Diamond in Copenhagen on 17 September 2012. Here, Rambøll, Bang & Olufsen and other companies shared case stories about how collaboration with researchers is creating value for their organisations.

Article
Using Experience Design to Reach a Broader Audience for Classical Music
How can we use new, digital technologies to make classical music more appealing and accessible – especially for a younger audience? A group of symphony orchestras and educational institutions in Denmark and Sweden have set out to address that question in a large-scale research collaboration that has received funding from the EU’s interregional development fund.

Dissertation
Inviting the Materials Into Co-Design Processes
Materials are important actors in co-design processes. Therefore they should be invited in and assigned roles when co-designers organise projects, workshops or events, for example in the field of service design. That is one of the key conclusions in a PhD dissertation on the role of materials in co-design which Mette Agger Eriksen defended at Malmö University on 13 June 2012.
> Download dissertation (pdf)

Dissertation
Realising the Full Potential of Drawing
Drawing is a language in its own right that holds a large potential for idea development, says Anette Højlund, who defended her PhD dissertation on drawing and creation on 13 April 2012. In the dissertation she examines what she calls the dialogue between the drawing and the person drawing. In this conversation with Mind Design she concludes that the potential of drawing could be utilised far better, for example in visualising issues that reach across disciplinary boundaries.
> Download dissertation summary (pdf)

Dissertation
Hierarchies and Humour in the Design Process
Humour plays an important role in the design process, argues Mette Volf, who recently defended her PhD dissertation Når nogen ler, er der noget på spil (When someone laughs there is something at stake). In her dissertation she explores the design process as social construct. Humour is used, for example, to turn the formal hierarchies on their head.

Dissertation
PhD Dissertation Challenges Traditional Interaction Design
Interaction design can easily incorporate both a body element and an empathy element. This was demonstrated by Maiken Hillerup Fogtmann, who as part of her PhD project developed interactive exercise equipment for team handball players and computer-based play equipment for children. She defended her dissertation, Designing with the Body in Mind, on 23 January 2012 at the Aarhus School of Architecture.
> Download dissertation summary (pdf)

Article
Making Active and Innovative Use of Your Customer Base
Companies are keen to get in touch with their customers and users in order to gain new ideas for products and business potentials. A project headed by the Danish Technological Institute focuses on user types that are potentially valuable for business. The conclusion is that the key lies in getting involved, identifying the company’s needs and involving the right users at the right time in the strategic processes.

Article
Design as Innovation Facilitator
Design-driven innovation in companies can result in both actual product development and the development of processes and business strategies. That was one of the points made at the workshop Design Driven Innovation – Organizing for Growth held at the Kolding School of Design in December 2011. Furthermore, the role of the position of design in relation to the individual company or organisation was emphasised.

Innovating for People
Handbook of Human-Centered Design Methods
by LUMA Institute
2012, 86 pages

Abstract
Innovation is an economic imperative that calls for more people to be innovating, more often. This handbook equips people in various lines of work to become more innovative. It provides specific guidance for bringing new and lasting value into the world.
The key ingredient to successful innovation is the everyday practice of Human-Centered Design: the discipline of developing solutions in the service of people. Every story of a good innovation–whether it’s a new product, a new service, a new business model or a new form of governance– begins and ends with people. It starts with careful discernment of human needs, and concludes with solutions that meet or exceed personal expectations.

This handbook is your essential resource for innovation. It’s a compact reference book describing thirty-six methods of Human-Centered Design, organized by way of three key design skills:
- Looking: Methods for observing human experience
- Understanding: Methods for analyzing challenges and opportunities
- Making: Methods for envisioning future possibilities

Each featured method includes a brief description; a pictorial example; a listing of benefits; a sampling of method combinations; and a quick guide with helpful hints for initial application. The full collection of methods is small enough to digest quickly, yet large enough to address myriad challenges. This book does not prescribe a formulaic innovation process. Rather, it introduces a versatile set of methods for practicing Human-Centered Design as a daily discipline in order to be more innovative and drive sustainable growth.

LUMA Institute
LUMA Institute is a Pittsburgh-based education company that teaches people how to be more innovative. Through a hands-on curriculum, LUMA helps organizations learn and apply the discipline of Human-Centered Design to create new value and drive sustainable growth.

A personal comment
Chris Pacione and Justine Knecht sent me the booklet about a month ago, and my partner Jan-Christoph Zoels took it home immediately to read it from cover to cover. I only got it back today, and wanted to make sure that I plug it to the community before another Experientia team member runs away with it.

In short, it is an excellent and very practical resource for the UX community. Highly recommended.

LUMA has also published a deck of cards. Although I haven’t seen it yet, I am sure it must be on the same level of quality.

Chris Pacione is an old friend, whom we got to know at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, when he worked for BodyMedia. After consulting with Maya Design, he is now the Director and CEO of the LUMA Institute. Also Justin Knecht is an old Experientia friend: he used to be the driving force at the Siglo, Ireland based Centre for Design Innovation.

Our friends at human-centered design consultancy Namahn in Brussels have created a lovely “human drive” card set to be used as a source of inspiration for ideation and co-design sessions.

The 48 cards, that have the exact size and feel of playing cards, are organised in four categories: Who Am I?, How Do I Interact With Others?, Why Am I Doing What I Do?, and What Makes Me Happy?.

An accompanying leaflet places the 48 drives in a flower-like diagram and explains that the cards were conceived – by Kristel Van Ael, we were told – as a design tool to stimulate us to think about our users and empathise with them. Here is how the Namahn team words their vision for the cards:

“People do not buy or use products and services just for the sake of it. They do it in order to reach underlying goals and fulfil deeper needs, which are what we call the human drives. While the products and services can change, these human drives are timeless and universal.

Remembering this leads to a more human-centered view of design. The focus is no longer purely on creating products or services, but more on designing ‘solutions’ that correspond to these drives.”

Namahn partners Joannes Vandermeulen and Joep Paemen gave me a set on Friday, and since the cards are not mentioned on their site, I assume they are conceived as a smart relationship management tool, so not for sale. Do contact them if you are interested.

Martin C. Pedersen reports in a long article for Metropolis Magazine on the 2014 BMW i3, the company’s first fully electric vehicle aimed at city driving.

The article focuses on how BMW’s new business strategy is all based on the core importance of the product experience:

“An ambitious experiment, with hefty up-front costs estimated to be as high as $200 million, the roll-out has the potential to both shift the company’s business model — from selling a product to selling the experience that product provides — and redefine the car’s role in an increasingly connected urban world.” [...]

BMW has gone all-in on the urban mobility angle, taking several pages out of the car- and bike-sharing playbooks. The system uses the emerging connection between mobile devices and BMW that already exists in a nascent form in Germany. Don Norman, the noted designer and author, does consulting work for the automaker and has seen the system in action: “In Munich, when I’m with the BMW crowd, if we’re in the city and decide to drive someplace, one of the guys will take out his cell phone and open up an app that tells him where a car is located. He reserves one that’s a block away. We walk over, he waves his BMW badge, and the car unlocks. The car is not just available to BMW people. Anyone who belongs to the subscription service can do it.”

Read article